4043. Robert Southey to John Rickman, 16 July 1823

 

Endorsement: RS to JR 16 July/ 1823
MS: Huntington Library, RS 441. ALS; 3p.
Unpublished.
Note on MS: The final page of the MS includes the following note in Rickman’s hand: ‘2 Inches thick/ A Veined Slab –/ 6 Feet by 4 Feet/ with a xxxx xxxx/ and small Vxxxx/ light Vein – Slab/ The polished, and/ Inscription – Rxxxxan –/ out and blackend –/ as follows – xxxx’

My dear R.

The only alterations which I have made in the Banavie inscription – are in v. 6 which is to be read

Record the architects immortal name

& v. 8

The whole great work was planned & perfected

both for the sake of not repeating the same expression in different inscriptions.

(1)

Southey had visited the Caledonian Canal with Rickman and Thomas Telford on their tour of Scotland in August–September 1819. He wrote three ‘Inscriptions for the Caledonian Canal’: ‘Inscription for a Tablet at Banavie, on the Caledonian Canal’, Friendship’s Offering. A Literary Album (London, 1826), pp. [167]–168; and ‘At Clachnacharry’ and ‘At Fort Augustus’, The Anniversary; or, Poetry and Prose for MDCCCXXIX (London, 1829), pp. 194–197. Southey had made these changes to lines 6 and 8 of ‘Inscription for a Tablet at Banavie on the Caledonian Canal’.

– I send the alterations now that because there is no correcting a stone cutters work like a printers.

(2)

Rickman was Secretary to the Commissioners for the Caledonian Canal and had suggested that Southey’s poems should be engraved on stone tablets at suitable points along the canal’s course. Only ‘Inscription for a Tablet at Banavie, on the Caledonian Canal’ was carved, on a large white marble slab, and it was not publicly displayed until it was placed in its current location, in the boundary wall of the canal offices, Clachnaharry Road, Inverness, in 1922, on the canal’s centenary.

Some improvements I have made in the other two, – but as they may wait for more – I will not send them in their revised form at present.

What a fate for the Dodo!

(3)

 

Southey’s reference is obscure and not clarified by Rickman’s surviving letters. The allusion is possibly to Edith May Southey, whose appearance in early childhood had been compared by her father to that of a young dodo.

God bless you
RS.

July 16. 1823.

Notes

1. Southey had visited the Caledonian Canal with Rickman and Thomas Telford on their tour of Scotland in August–September 1819. He wrote three ‘Inscriptions for the Caledonian Canal’: ‘Inscription for a Tablet at Banavie, on the Caledonian Canal’, Friendship’s Offering. A Literary Album (London, 1826), pp. [167]–168; and ‘At Clachnacharry’ and ‘At Fort Augustus’, The Anniversary; or, Poetry and Prose for MDCCCXXIX (London, 1829), pp. 194–197. Southey had made these changes to lines 6 and 8 of ‘Inscription for a Tablet at Banavie on the Caledonian Canal’.[back]
2. Rickman was Secretary to the Commissioners for the Caledonian Canal and had suggested that Southey’s poems should be engraved on stone tablets at suitable points along the canal’s course. Only ‘Inscription for a Tablet at Banavie, on the Caledonian Canal’ was carved, on a large white marble slab, and it was not publicly displayed until it was placed in its current location, in the boundary wall of the canal offices, Clachnaharry Road, Inverness, in 1922, on the canal’s centenary.[back]
3. Southey’s reference is obscure and not clarified by Rickman’s surviving letters. The allusion is possibly to Edith May Southey, whose appearance in early childhood had been compared by her father to that of a young dodo.[back]
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