Robert Southey edited two volumes of his Annual Anthology (1799, 1800)—click on that link and you’ll see that James Cummins Bookseller is offering the pair for sale at the low-low price of $3500. Bargain!
Herein were first published of a good number of poems by Southey himself, and by Samuel Taylor Coleridge too (not to mention Charles Lamb, George Dyer, Joseph Cottle, Sir Humphry Davy and others), including some very famous pieces: Coleridge's ‘Lewti’ and ‘This Lime Tree Bower My Prison’ and Southey's ‘Battle of Blenheim’, as well as his ‘The Old Man's Comforts’, so famously parodied by Lewis Carroll as ‘You Are Old, Father William’. Southey planned a third annual, but in the event it didn't happen.
Many of the poems in the Anthology are attributed to their authors either by direct name, or transparent pseudonym (several of Coleridge’s are signed ‘Esteesi’ for instance—that is ‘STC’, a common pseudonym he used). Others are not attributed, but scholars have tracked down authorship, using Southey and Coleridge’s own annotated copies of the volumes, later collected editions of poets and so on.
Four of the Annual Anthology poems are signed ‘William Case Jr’, all of them appearing in vol 2: ‘Gorthmund’, ‘Sonnet VIII’, ‘Sonnet IX: to a Friend on presenting him with a Volume of M.S.S. Poems’ (at the head of this post) and ‘A Winter Sketch’. Nobody knows anything about this geezer; not who he was, nor how he knew Southey or Coleridge (if he knew Southey: maybe he offered his submissions out of the blue). ‘Not otherwise identified,’ says Kenneth Curry, adding: ‘no books of Case are in the British Museum or Bodleian.’1 He's not a very good poet, I think; but I was curious about him, so I had a rummage around.
I didn’t find much, but I found a couple of things.
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