Daniel Stuart

Daniel Stuart (1766–1846) was a Scottish journalist, and associate of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

He was born in Edinburgh on 16 November 1766, into the traditionally Jacobite Stuarts of Loch Rannoch. In 1778 he was sent to London to join his elder brothers, Charles and Peter, who were in the printing business. The eldest brother Charles Stuart took play-writing. Peter Stuart (fl. 1788–1805) started the Tory paper The Oracle before 1788, and in 1788 set up The Star, which was the first London evening paper to appear regularly. Daniel and Peter lived together with their sister Catherine, who in February 1789 secretly married James Mackintosh. She died in April 1796.

Daniel Stuart assisted Mackintosh as secretary to the Society of the Friends of the People, for parliamentary reform. In 1794 he published a pamphlet, Peace and Reform, against War and Corruption, in answer to Arthur Young's The Example of France a Warning to Great Britain.

In 1788, Peter and Daniel Stuart undertook the printing of the Morning Post, a moderate Whig newspaper, which was then owned by Richard Tattersall, and was at a low ebb. In 1795 Tattersall disposed of it to the Stuarts; Daniel Stuart took on the management, and within two years Stuart raised the circulation of the paper from 350 a day to a thousand. Gradually he converted it into an organ of the moderate Tories. By buying in The Gazetteer and The Telegraph, good management and hiring talented writers, he made the Post a rival to the Morning Chronicle, then the top London daily.

Mackintosh, who wrote regularly for it in its earlier days, introduced Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Stuart in 1797. Coleridge became a frequent contributor, and when, in the autumn of 1798, he went to Germany, Robert Southey supplied contributions in his place. On Coleridge's return it was arranged that he should give his whole time to the Morning Post and receive Stuart's largest salary. Stuart took rooms for him in King Street, Covent Garden, and Coleridge told William Wordsworth that he dedicated his nights and days to Stuart (Wordsworth, Life of Wordsworth, i. 160). Coleridge introduced Charles Lamb to Stuart; but Stuart was never impressed, though Lamb wrote of himself as having been connected with the Post from 1800 to 1803. Wordsworth, unpaid, contributed some political sonnets.

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