Material from the Romantic Circles Website may not be downloaded, reproduced or disseminated in any manner without authorization unless it is for purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, and/or classroom use as provided by the Copyright Act of 1976, as amended.
Unless otherwise noted, all Pages and Resources mounted on Romantic Circles are copyrighted by the author/editor and may be shared only in accordance with the Fair Use provisions of U.S. copyright law. Except as expressly permitted by this statement, redistribution or republication in any medium requires express prior written consent from the author/editors and advance notification of Romantic Circles. Any requests for authorization should be forwarded to Romantic Circles:>
By their use of these texts and images, users agree to the following conditions:
Users are not permitted to download these texts and images in order to mount them on their own servers. It is not in our interest or that of our users to have uncontrolled subsets of our holdings available elsewhere on the Internet. We make corrections and additions to our edited resources on a continual basis, and we want the most current text to be the only one generally available to all Internet users. Institutions can, of course, make a link to the copies at Romantic Circles, subject to our conditions of use.
Morgan Library, MA 63. Previously published: Kenneth Curry (ed.), New Letters of Robert Southey, 2 vols (London and New York, 1965), I, pp. 516–518.
These letters were edited with the assistance of Carol Bolton, Tim Fulford and Ian Packer
For permission to publish the text of MSS in their possession, the editor wishes to thank the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; the Bodleian Library Oxford University; the British Library; Boston Public Library; the Syndics of Cambridge University Library; the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge; Haverford College, Connecticut; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Hornby Library, Liverpool Libraries and Information Services; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the John Rylands Library, Manchester; the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas; Luton Museum (Bedfordshire County Council); Massachusetts Historical Society; McGill University Library; the National Library of Scotland; the Newberry Library, Chicago; the New York Public Library (Pforzheimer Collections); the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; the Public Record Offices of Bedford, Suffolk (Bury St Edmunds) and Northumberland, the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne; the Trustees of the William Salt Library, Stafford, the Wisbech and Fenland Museum; the University of Virginia Library.
A research grant from the British Academy made much of the archival work possible, as did support from the English Department of Nottingham Trent University.
Any dashes occurring in line breaks have been removed.
Because of web browser variability, all hyphens have been typed on the U.S. keyboard.
Dashes have been rendered as a variable number of hyphens to give a more exact rendering of their length.
Southey’s spelling has not been regularized.
Writing in other hands appearing on these manuscripts has been indicated as such, the content recorded in brackets.
& has been used for the ampersand sign.
£ has been used for £, the pound sign
All other characters, those with accents, non-breaking spaces, etc., have been encoded in HTML entity decimals.
I had begun to write in enquiry what was become of you, when your letter arrived, nearly three weeks after its date: −
mine probably would have been finished & dispatched before that time, −− had it not been for a growing uneasiness respecting the
Dutchess of Gordon,
We missed you when you left us. Herbert has not yet
xx ceased to ask where is Miss Betham gone? & why did she go? − to which he adds frequent enquiries concerning his
boy – what is to be done to him, & when he is to be put. We were dreadfully alarmed about him on Thursday last – When his mother went up as usual, the last thing at night, to look at him. – she heard the croup
sound in his throat. − & you may conceive the agitation into which it threw us. But it seems that the disease wears itself out when
it does not prove fatal at first, & it appears to be got under, God be praised, without the necessity of xxx recurring
to those remedies which so greatly tormented & reduced him before. Poor fellow, − I have so deep & ever-present a sense of the
precariousness of an infants life, − that had you talked of taking his picture before me, I believe I should have tried to invent some
excuse for why it should not be done, − when the real reason would have been – a secret dread lest it should ever become to
me an object of pain. He will not be persuaded that his father loves him too much, − but his father is very well convinced of it
himself.
Mrs Lovell has been a month from home. She went first to the Senhouses, & they have persuaded her to go to Gilslandf as the only mark of respect for him which it was in
my power to show till a day or two ago, when I became impatient of being longer with dirty hands. Duppa arrived here on Thursday last, & departs tomorrow. – This is the history of our
proceedings since your departure.
You were here in an unlucky season, & I am vexed that it should have been so, − but I hope & trust it will not
be your only visit to Keswick − & that when next you come we shall be better provided both
with weather & society for you. It was very much my wish that you would have planned a poem here, when I might have scrutinized its
defects with the severest sincerity; − five minutes may alter that in a plan, which when executed becomes unalterable, − I did not
press this upon you − as I would have done at any other time, because I was aware that then you were more uneasy respecting your
brother than you expressed yourself to be, − & this I fear will for a long while xxx be the case.
By the time this reaches you Longman should have sent a cargo of
books to New Cavendish Street, which I hope to increase before Xmas with the first volume of my History,
I think Duppa will knock at your door & ask to see his Keswick friends, & I have a design of getting the sweetest woman I have know in
this world to do the same, if Edith can be prevailed upon to write to her. You
have probably heard her speak of Mrs Gonne,
Edaws
Godmother, the only person I ever saw whom every body that ever came near her seemed to love as tho she were their sister. – Bertha is much grown & very much improved since you were here; − she is now
become delicate kissing − tho as yet short of the age in which all those reasons for kissing become valid which hold good at present
between me & the Moon of the family.
Pray remember us very kindly to George Dyer whenever you chance to
see him – which by the by reminds me to say that his he should be framed in company with the others destined
inhabitants of my chimney piece. – I am sorry you fell in with a drunken Landlady – so little is my acquaintance with the live-stock of
the neighbourhood that this is the first time I ever heard of her good qualities. Ediths love. my daughter has just given me a kiss to inclose. −
& Herbert enquires ‘ere did she lose her ikky bit of bue.’