The Social Insect and the Fashionable Newspaper: Reading Bee Poems in the World and the Morning Post

Fashionable West End newspapers such as the Oracle, the Morning Post and the World became an important space for the publication of original poetry in the final decades of the eighteenth century. In particular, the popularity of the pseudonymous Della Cruscan school of poetry, nurtured in the pages of the World and featuring the serialized romance of “Della Crusca” (Robert Merry) and “Anna Matilda” (Hannah Cowley), began a fad for similarly sociable, playful and erotic poetry in the papers that lasted well into the 1790s. This chapter reads a number of bee poems published in the Oracle and the Morning Post against the backdrop of the Della Cruscan phenomenon and its subsequent decline in popularity in the latter half of the 1790s. I suggest that a series of bee poems published in the Treasury-supported Oracle for 1790 reflect a very Della Cruscan investment in viewing the bee as a social insect—the bee functions as a light-hearted trope that connects a number of poets in the pages of the paper. This playful use of the bee, however, stands in strong contrast to a number of bee poems published later in the decade in the radical Opposition-supported Morning Post that reveal an increasing interest in viewing the bee not as a social insect but as a metaphor for the plight of the working classes. I suggest that the increasing use of the bee as a metaphor for the working classes as the eighteenth century draws to a close reflects an increasing consciousness of class struggle in the conservative climate of wartime Britain.