4302. Robert Southey to Caroline Bowles [fragment], 23 December 1824

 

MS: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. TR; 1p. 
Unpublished.
Note on MS: The letter survives as a fragmentary transcript in the hand of Caroline Bowles.

Decr – 23 – – 1824 –

“Thank you for not caring for the abuse which has been – is – & will be poured upon me

(1)

The Morning Chronicle, 17 December 1824, published a letter headed ‘Southey versus Lord Byron’, which contained a sustained attack on Southey. (The latter eventually decided not to take legal action.) Southey believed that the letter was a response to the one he had written to the Editor of the Courier, 8 December 1824, Letter 4289 (published 13 December 1824) – which was, in turn, a reply to the material on Southey in Thomas Medwin (1788–1869; DNB), Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron: Noted During a Residence with his Lordship at Pisa, in the Years 1821 and 1822 (1824).

– Thanks you for marking & knowing how heartily – in the Swedes english – I do contempts it –

One of the pleasures & blessings of life is to meet with those who can understa <understand> us – for whom a word – or a glance suffices – who can interpret even our silence – & who at a distance – without any communication, feels what we should feel on on any particular occurrence, with the confidence of unerring sympathy –

For those who can do that by each other – Caroline, it can never be too late to meet – ”

You have not told me the result of your accxtexxx to the Monster –

(2)

Blackwood published Caroline Bowles’s next volume of poetry, Solitary Hours (1826).

We must have a new version of the story of Beauty & Beast –

Selema making advances to Azor”

(3)

Sir George Collier (1732–1795; DNB), Selima and Azor (1776), an orientalised version of the Beauty and the Beast story that exploited contemporary taste for the exotic. Azor was the name that Southey and Bowles used for Bowles’s publisher, William Blackwood. In this conceit, presumably ‘Selema’ is Bowles.

Notes

1. The Morning Chronicle, 17 December 1824, published a letter headed ‘Southey versus Lord Byron’, which contained a sustained attack on Southey. (The latter eventually decided not to take legal action.) Southey believed that the letter was a response to the one he had written to the Editor of the Courier, 8 December 1824, Letter 4289 (published 13 December 1824) – which was, in turn, a reply to the material on Southey in Thomas Medwin (1788–1869; DNB), Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron: Noted During a Residence with his Lordship at Pisa, in the Years 1821 and 1822 (1824).[back]
2. Blackwood published Caroline Bowles’s next volume of poetry, Solitary Hours (1826).[back]
3. Sir George Collier (1732–1795; DNB), Selima and Azor (1776), an orientalised version of the Beauty and the Beast story that exploited contemporary taste for the exotic. Azor was the name that Southey and Bowles used for Bowles’s publisher, William Blackwood. In this conceit, presumably ‘Selema’ is Bowles.[back]
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