• Name: Tabart, Benjamin
• Gender: Male
• Birth Date:
• Death Date:
• Occupation: editor

St Clair suggests that Tabert employed Mary Jane to help him prepare his children's books. Mary Jane did so to make ends meet. Tabert is also mentioned in Locke and Marshall.

The most authoritive source on Tabart is from an introduction to the 'Hockiffe' digital media project that notes the Godwins connection with Tabart and suggests Godwin's possible involvement as an editor of Tabart's Popular Stories. There is also a suggestion that Tabart may be a pseudonym for Sir Richard Philips, but the character of Godwin's diary entries suggest otherwise. The above site also shows the links between Godwin and Lucy Aiken and Eliza Fenwick, both of whom worked for Tabart.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Quoting from their site: ‘Despite the fact that Benjamin Tabart's name appears as editor on an 1818 one-volume edition of the tales, a case can be made that the editor of the series was in fact William Godwin, novelist, radical political philosopher and later publisher and author of children's books. A French edition of his Fables Ancient and Modern was advertised as being by the 'Editor of Tabart's Popular Stories'. If Godwin translated his own work, as seems not unlikely, then this would suggest that he was the editor of Tabart's tales (see Carpenter 1984: 419). It has also been noted that the entry 'write to Phillips on Perrault' appears in Godwin's journal for the first half of 1804 (Alderson 1998: 164). Since Charles Perrualt was the original author of several of the fairy tales in the series, and Sir Richard Phillips was Tabart's close collaborator, this indicates that Godwin was involved in some part of the editorial process. However, it is also possible that Mary Jane Godwin, William's second wife, was the translator of his Fables, a suggestion supported by a book they published jointly in 1809, Dramas for Children ... by the Editor of Tabart's Popular Stories. AND ON TABART (also directly quoted from Hockliffe website - note the connections to Lucy Aikin (AIK03), Richard Phillips (PHI01), and E Fenwick (FEN03): 'As for Benjamin Tabart himself, little is known of the man, and it has been suggested that his name was used as a cover for Sir Richard Phillips, writer, publisher and political radical. The very respectable Lucy Aikin, for instance, in a preface to one of Tabart's publications, complained that 'dragons and fairies, giants and witches, have vanished from our nurseries before the wand of reason' (Poetry for Children, 1801, p.iii), and William Godwin was saying much the same thing in the preface to his Bible Stories, another Tabart production. Several of his own publications depict his business as a thoroughly successful concern; the best of these is Eliza Fenwick's Visits to the Juvenile Library; or, Knowledge Proved to be the Source of Happiness (1805) which includes illustrations depicting Tabart's shop, inside and out'. Of course, if Tabart was not Tabart but Phillips's nom de plume, the entries become problematic. 1810 has 12 Tabart entries, and look like publishing business: 9 Feb. F. Call on Miles (w. Place), Bonsor , Tabart n and Longdil and 23 June. Sa. Call on Ballachey , Tabart n (Guildhall ; adv. Miles, Letterman, Lackington, Harris, andc)

• Quarterly Review (1819).
• Hockliffe Project, http://www.cts.dmu.ac.uk/hockliffe/.
• St Clair, p. 259.
• Locke, p. 212.
• Marshall, pp. 265 and 275.

This table lists the people this person is most frequently noted with in the diary.