Daniel Stuart 

Daniel Stuart (1766-1846) served in the early 1790s as secretary to the Society of the Friends of the People, a group to which his brother-in-law, James Mackintosh, also belonged.  During this time he received some notoriety for his publication of Peace and reform, against war and corruption (1794).  In 1788 he and his brother, Peter, became printers of the moderately Whig London paper, the Morning Post; they became owners in 1795.   Stuart later acquired the Courier, an evening paper. Within two years the Post began to rival the Morning Chronicle, considered by many to be London’s best daily paper.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey contributed numerous poems to the Post between 1797 and 1800, as did Charles Lamb and William Wordsworth.  Stuart’s radicalism had diminished somewhat by 1800, but his paper still maintained a position of liberal to moderate views on a number of major issues dear to the reformers.  He was opposed to blatant Jacobinism, but he was also opposed to many of Pitt’s policies, especially the continuance of the war with France. Stuart gave up the Post in 1803, devoting himself to the Courier. In 1798 the pro-Pitt London periodical, the Anti-Jacobin, still considered the Morning Post to be a “Jacobin” paper (Anti-Jacobin 7 May 1798).  For more on Stuart and the liberal London papers at this time, see Andrews, British Periodical Press, 124-37.