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These letters were edited with the assistance of Ian Packer and Lynda Pratt
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Introduction
The letters brought together in this edition commence on 1 January 1819 with Southey the Poet Laureate in forceful mood, condemning as fit only to be ‘bum-fiddled’ his latest New Year’s Ode and promising to return to his public quarrel with the politician Henry Brougham (Letter 3228).
The 546 letters published here bear testimony to the tremendous vigour and immense labour that underpinned Southey’s correspondence in middle age. In the years 1819–1821, a still-growing network of correspondents ensured that he continued to receive a host of letters – some welcome, others not. Replying to them was a formidable commitment and as Southey himself admitted, ‘letter writing … consumes far too great a portion of my time’ (Letter 3516). The surviving letters show his ability both to tailor correspondence to its recipient and to extract any information he required from them. In 1819–1821, the physician Henry Herbert Southey was sent explicit descriptions of the health of the assorted members of Southey’s household and asked to diagnose their ailments (for example, Letters 3324 and 3676). In contrast, the London-based Grosvenor Bedford was given instructions to pay bills and purchase household goods from shops, and reminded to ask for a discount (Letters 3424 and 3587).
Political engagement, and the networking and name-dropping that came with it, was one aspect of Southey’s life, his role as a leading author another. In 1819–1821, Southey continued to correspond with important figures in the literary and publishing worlds, including James Hogg, Walter Savage Landor, John Murray, Thomas Longman, Walter Scott and William Wordsworth. In addition, these years marked the gradual intensification of his exchange of letters with a new generation of ambitious authors who sought his advice and his patronage, including Bernard Barton, Caroline Bowles, Ebenezer Elliott and Chauncy Hare Townshend. Other correspondents in the period 1819–1821 indicate his range of interests and contacts, including Isaac D’Israeli, the Earl of Lonsdale, Mary Anne Watts Hughes, George Ticknor, David Laing, Edward Hawke Locker, Percy Shelley, William Shield (Master of the King’s Music), Baron de Sorsum (the translator of
By January 1819, the forty-three-year-old Southey had established a name for himself as a significant, prolific writer who worked across a number of genres: poetry and prose; history and commentary on current affairs; biography and travelogue; translation and original composition. He had fathered seven children (four of whom were still living), and his wife was heavily pregnant with their eighth (and last) child, Charles Cuthbert, born 24 February 1819 (Letters 3250–3253). Since autumn 1803, the Southeys had rented Greta Hall, on the outskirts of the Lake District market town of Keswick. The property was also home to Edith Southey’s sisters Mary Lovell and Sarah Coleridge, to the latter’s daughter, Sara, and to Elizabeth Wilson, the elderly housekeeper. Life at Greta Hall had, by 1819, fallen into a fairly regular routine. The warmer summer months were the ‘idle season’, punctuated by ‘a series of interruptions’ (Letter 3333). They saw a stream of friends and tourists beating their way to the house, and Southey and his family occasionally leaving it on visits to Lake District neighbours. The latter included members of the landed classes, such as the Earl of Lonsdale, who supplied Southey with game for his table, and Humphrey Senhouse, whose home at Netherhall provided ‘sea bathing’, a ‘beneficial’ ‘Change of air’ and plenty of ‘good books’ for Southey to devour (Letters 3761 and 3710). As winter set in, the front door bell was ‘seldom disturbed’, and Southey retreated to his desk and to the labour demanded of a professional writer (Letter 3452).
Southey’s life had its set rhythms and routines, but these were not immune to subtle changes in wider society. A notable development in the late 1810s, for example, was the increasing number of Cambridge undergraduates entertained at Greta Hall. The young men were, Southey noted, following ‘a late fashion’ and visiting the Lakes ‘in flights to study during the long vacation’ (Letter 3715). This was itself a sign of the increasing seriousness with which ambitious young men were taking the demands of the mathematics-dominated Cambridge degree course. Southey’s letters record their visits and the strange appellation given to them by the locals – ‘Cathedrals’ – the result of ‘a comical confusion, first between Collegian & College, & then between College & Cathedral’. This led to some amusing incidents, such as when an undergraduate who ‘lodged at Clarke the Gardners’ was sent a bill addressed to ‘Mr Clarke’s Cathedral’ (Letter 3715).
Southey’s letters reveal the relish with which he related anecdotes about his guests. However, the
exchange cut both ways and some of his visitors had their say about him, publishing accounts of their meetings.
They included Samuel Heinrich Spiker, Librarian to the King of Prussia, whose recollections of his 1816 visit to
Greta Hall appeared in an English translation in 1820.
Although Southey’s established reputation, extensive correspondence and vast library brought the world – welcome or not – within the walls of Greta Hall, he continued to make the occasional extended visit from home. From August to September 1819 he toured Scotland with John Rickman and Thomas Telford, who were travelling as part of their work for the government Commissions charged with building the Caledonian Canal and new roads and bridges in the Highlands. The trip allowed Southey to buy rare books in Edinburgh; to see ‘some of the greatest works which were ever undertaken by any Government for the improvement of its dominions’; to be made ‘an honorary member of the Literary Society of – Banff’; and to lose a night’s sleep thanks to an initiation ceremony conducted in the room above his bedchamber by the ‘Free masons of Nairn’ (Letter 3350). It also led to some rather nerve-racking encounters with local doctors, when an ‘excrescence’ on his scalp ‘became troublesome the day … [he] left Edinburgh, & suppurated shortly after’ (Letter 3352). Southey consulted a number of medical men in Perth, Aberdeen and Inverness to varying effect, and Telford, who was sharing a room with him, was given the unpleasant task of dressing the wound every ‘morning & evening’ (Letters 3352 and 3350). Southey’s correspondence reveals that although he sometimes made light of his condition, nicknaming the ‘excrescence’ ‘Skiddaw’, after the Lake District mountain, at other times, he was ‘perplexed & uneasy’, wishing he ‘were either at home, or in London’ (Letter 3346). Significantly, although he kept some correspondents informed of ‘Skiddaw’s’ progress, he gave ‘no intimation’ in his ‘letters home’ to his wife and family, presumably because he did not want to worry them (Letter 3349).
A second major trip of the period was made between April and June 1820, when Southey visited his old friends Wynn (at Llangedwin) and Wade Browne (at Ludlow) before heading to London and the south of England. He arrived in the capital too late for one appointment (dinner at the Royal Academy); nevertheless the plethora of engagements that ensued was ‘such indeed as almost to make me dizzy’ (Letter 3478). The frenetic pace was captured in a letter to his wife, describing ‘how my time has been past’:
Friday last I breakfasted with Miss Wordsworth at her brothers, & dined at Marianne’s – a large party. Saturday at Harry Inglis’s where I slept. Sunday Mrs Gonnes. Monday breakfasted with Turner dined with Kenyon & met Coleridge & Derwent there. Tuesday breakfast with Henry Robinson, – walked to Wapping to see the sister of Elton Hamond, dined with the Imperial General. Wednesday breakfasted with Dr Ashburner to meet Rex & his daughter Zoe, – but they had been called off the evening before. however I met D Jardine & his wife. – then to the Levee with Wynn, then to dinner at Murraylemagnes. Thursday breakfast with Dr Wordsworth, worked all the morning in the Lambeth library, dinner with a large uncomfortable party at Mrs Vardons. This morning worked again at Lambeth, & now must dress to dine with D’Israeli.
My dinner engagements stand thus – tomorrow Rickman, – Sunday G.C.B. Monday Sir George B. Tuesday at home. Wednesday with Harrys friend Mrs Cookson. Thursday Mr Butler. Friday Wilber Saturday Sunday Monday Richmond. Tuesday Courtenay. Wednesday Mr Bill. Thursday _______. Friday D Jardine, – & on Saturday if I receive the answer which I hope for from Bunbury I go for Cambridge. (Letter 3481)
This exhaustive, and exhausting, list provides invaluable information about the larger circles within which Southey was moving and contributes to a more refined sense of how Romantic period social networking functioned. Southey’s letters also provide important insights into more intimate, enclosed spaces and sets of relationships, including the dynamics of the extended family that lived together at Greta Hall, known to some as the ‘Aunt hill’. During his 1820 journey from home, Southey – styling himself ‘comical Pappa’ – wrote home regularly to his younger daughters, Bertha, Kate and Isabel, providing vignettes of people he had met and of his own ‘ell-ell-deeing’, the grand occasion during which he ‘was made a Doctor of Laws at Oxford’, and promising to return laden with prosaic, but vital, items such as toys, books and jars of pickle (Letters 3499 and 3483).
Southey’s visit to Oxford after an absence of ‘six-and-twenty years’ gave him a fund of amusing anecdotes, a certain pride at his honorary degree, and abundant memories of his own youth and of those friends from his university days who were now ‘in their graves’ (Letters 3507). Southey believed in ghosts, ‘that the spirits of the dead have sometimes been permitted <to> appear’ (Letter 3256). By 1819, his own ‘dead’ included friends, his parents, several siblings and three of his own children. In the three years covered by
The detailed investigations into his family history prompted by Somerville’s death, and the possibility of a lawsuit and an inheritance had an unexpected result. Southey decided to ‘live again in remembrance with the dead’ and in July 1820 began the first of a series of long letters setting out his own and his family’s histories. These autobiographical writings provide a unique and invaluable record, one whose accuracy Southey tried to improve by taking advice from his elderly aunt, Mary Southey, who had known many of the individuals and lived through some of the events he described (Letter 3526). The autobiographical letters also had another purpose. They looked forward as well as back in an attempt to secure a different kind of legacy to himself and his heirs. Southey did not usually make copies of his correspondence. These were different. With an eye upon their ‘post-obit value’, Southey made a copy of them which he kept ‘among … [his] papers’, as a document on which a future biographer could draw (Letter 3561).
The movement to personal and familial retrospect found in the autobiographical letters is one side of Southey’s vast and complex correspondence. At the same time as he was writing detailed accounts of long dead ancestors, he retained a close interest in public affairs, and he continued to comment on developments in politics and society extensively through his letters and his published writings, particularly in the pages of the
At the national level, Southey’s correspondence charts his continuing interactions with political figures such as William Wilberforce and John Wilson Croker. Increasingly, as these letters show, Southey felt no inhibitions about bombarding them in private with his advice, especially about the need to curb the radical press, as well as addressing national politics in his Laureate odes. He also began to meet some of the Church of England’s bishops. William Howley, the Bishop of London, for example, visited Southey in 1819 after the two men had corresponded over Southey’s attempt to help his friend Henry Koster find a chaplain for the expatriate community at Pernambuco, Brazil. Moreover, the Anglican hierarchy believed that Southey’s criticism of the founder of Methodism in his
Southey’s relationship with the monarchy also became closer in these years. He had only met George IV once – in 1813 – and he had always been careful not to heap unctuous praise on the King in his Laureate poems. However, his brother, Henry Herbert Southey, was a close friend of Sir William Knighton, the King’s physician and, effectively, his private secretary. In 1821 Knighton presented Southey’s
As his letters reveal, in 1819–1821 Southey remained as busy and engaged with the literary world as he had ever been. He continued to be involved in disputes with contemporaries whose views he did not share, including Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Shelley, Byron and Cobbett. His correspondence sheds new light on these feuds, on the gradations of wickedness he assigned to individual authors (Shelley’s ‘obscure’ poetry made him less ‘flagitious’ than Byron, Letter 3611) and on his advocacy of censorship of the press. It makes it possible, for example, to track how Southey discovered that Byron’s
Southey himself continued to be a prolific author and, indeed, expressed the hope that he would ‘add many volumes’ to the shelves and ‘do good service both to the Church and State’ (Letters 3560 and 3507). In 1819–1821 he published a third, and final, volume of his
The letters shed important new light on these writings, showing their origins, their development and (in some cases) their progress to publication and beyond. They also allow for a more refined understanding of Southey’s methods and responses when faced with a potentially tricky situation. In 1820 he published a
… remonstrating with him upon the improper liberties which he had taken with her, – it is in a strain of the warmest affection, & the most unbounded reverence; & yet at the same time shows that she was a virtuous woman, & was alarmed at his conduct. He must then have been about sixty five years of age. (Letter 3603)
Although the Dean of Worcester, who had sent him the copy of Miss Briggs’s letter, attested to its authenticity, Southey needed more proof before he could include it in a second edition of the
Southey lived at a time when public interest in the lives of individuals was on the rise. Although he could – and did – protest about intrusion into his own private life, he loved ‘the rich veins of gossip and garrulity’ (Letter 3526). He was, moreover, not averse to including personal information about others in his own works – for example, in his 1813 biography of Horatio Nelson. However, the Wesley–Briggs incident, recovered here for the first time, says much about the principles and methods that governed his work as a biographer and the priority he placed upon authenticating his sources before committing information to the public sphere. It also provides a tantalising link between Southey’s belief in the necessity for press censorship, given the susceptibility of the public to believing all they read, and his refusal as a biographer to further corrupt the minds of his readers with unverified information.
As well as shedding new light on the practice of someone already recognised as an important Romantic period biographer, Southey’s correspondence has much to say about areas of his writing life that are much less familiar, or, indeed, not known at all. These include a planned edition of the writings of the suicide Elton Hamond that was abandoned on the grounds that it would be dangerous to send ‘abroad opinions which no antidote can prevent from infecting minds predisposed to … receive the … morbid matter’ (Letter 3443). Other potential projects revealed here include a second volume of
Some of Southey’s unknown or overlooked works of the late 1810s and early 1820s did make it beyond
the drawing board. They include a privately commissioned biography of the wealthy wine merchant, philanthropist and
educationalist David Pike Watts, composed at the ‘desire’ of his daughter and heiress Mary Watts-Russell ‘for her
children, & perhaps for private circulation’ (Letter 3544). (It did not, in fact, appear in print until 1841,
when it was privately published.) This was not the first such project Southey had undertaken. In 1813 he had
written a defence of Sir George Barlow’s conduct while Governor of Madras. Commissioned by Barlow’s brother,
William, this had been published anonymously.
The economics of publishing were, indeed, to the fore in 1819–1821. As his letters show, Southey was increasingly conscious of the declining sales of his most financially successful poem,
The need – actual or perceived – for money underpinned Southey’s formidable work ethic and his decision to take on more projects than he could possibly complete (see, for example, Letter 3745). It also made him tenacious in his attempts to protect his name and to ensure that others did not benefit from it. Such efforts had, of course, extra piquancy after the debacle over
Some memoirs of the late King are now publishing in sixpenny numbers, and stated on the cover to be written by Robert Southy, Esq., with this farther notice, “observe to order Southy’s Life of the King to avoid imposition.” We are authorized to assure our readers that this is an impudent imposition; in which Mr. Southey’s name is used for the purpose of deceiving country purchasers, and misspelled in the hope that the fraudulent publisher may be enabled to evade the law. Other newspapers, we trust will insert this notice as an act of justice to the individual on whose reputation the fraud is practiced; and as one means of checking a species of swindling which is now become frequent.Westmorland Gazette , 12 February 1820.
The fraudster’s attempt to cash in played on the idea that, as Poet Laureate, Southey might well be expected to write something upon the death of the King. (It also called on public awareness of Southey as a biographer, at a point when his
Southey’s letters provide important new information about the development and publication of, and the initial response to, one of the most controversial and damaging of his poetical works. They also reveal tantalising connections between the poet of 1821 and the poet of the 1790s.