Author: Robinson, T. Pollingrove
Biography:
ROBINSON, T. Pollingrove (d 1797/8: Monthly Visitor)
The unprecedented name he went by and the absence of biographical sources have caused some bibliographers to suspect, incorrectly, that “Pollingrove Robinson” is a pseudonym. His place of origin, life dates, parentage, and education have not been identified, yet he was not entirely obscure: in 1788 and 1789 he dined with the dramatist Thomas Holcroft, the radical Thomas Brand Hollis, and the philosopher William Godwin (qq.v.); on 9 June 1789 “T. Pollingrove Robinson” wrote to the younger William Pitt (q.v.) to demand compensation for a lost manuscript; and he tutored Lord Chancellor Edward Thurlow’s two illegitimate daughters and resided with them at Thurlow’s Dulwich estate, Knight’s Hill Farm. To one of those daughters, Catherine, he dedicated his 1786 translation of the works of the Chevalier de Florian. In Christmas in a Cottage, Lucinda Strickland (q.v.) professedly imitated his Cassina (1782), “not in its Drift,” she wrote, “but in its Diction.” A tour of France and Italy resulted in The Beauties of Painting (London, George Robinson, 1782). Reviews of the book, though tepid, were not hostile. Not so his Handel’s Ghost (1785) that a critic called a “kind of travesty of Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast.” His The Prize of Venus, dedicated to the Duchess of Rutland, appeared in 1786, as did his genre-defying work in prose, a “mixture of science, fancy, and sentiment” (MR), Cometilla … Being an Introduction to Astronomy. His publisher issued Jessy; or, The Forced Vow in 1785 and 1787; in a preface, the poet dated the latter edition “Garden-Court, Temple.” Robinson wrote A Tour to the Isle of Love (1788) “at the earnest desire of a young Friend” who had lost his amour “after one little month’s connubial happiness.” Dedicated to William Taylor of Norwich (q.v.), the book combines imaginative prose with 150 or so lines of verse; it is notable for its superfluity of capitalizations: SOLICITUDE, ASSIDUITY, LOVE, PRETENSION, HOPE, CAUTION, THOUGHTS, and so on. His “Ballenden’s Braes. A Scotch Ballad,” published in The Lady’s Musical Magazine in 1788 with music by James Cook (ODNB), alone garnered lasting attention. His subscription to the 1791 Poems of Mary Robinson (q.v.) may indicate a family relationship. By the title of his final publication, we know that he died late in 1797 or early in 1798: “Sancho, An Original Portuguese Tale. By the late Pollingrove Robinson” appeared in Feb. 1798 in The Monthly Visitor, and Pocket Companion. (William Godwin’s Diary online 25 Mar. 2024; Ed Pope History online 25 Mar. 2024; M. Argent ed., Recollections of R.J.S. Stevens An Organist in Georgian England [1992], 143) JC
Other Names:
- Mr. Robinson
- Mr. [T. P.] Robinson
- T. P. Robinson