The Collected Letters of Robert Southey

This project is the first ever edition of the surviving letters of Robert Southey (1774-1843).  Admired, hated, imitated and ridiculed by his contemporaries, Southey’s reputation later declined to a point where he could be described as the ‘missing link’ of British Romanticism. The Collected Letters aims to transform understanding of both Southey and his complex relationships with his contemporaries. It provides newly transcribed and freshly edited texts of his letters, the majority of which are published here for the first time. The figure that emerges from his vast correspondence is complex: a multi-disciplinary, multi-lingual, one-man literary industry, an ardent polemicist and advocate of writers’ right to intervene in public life. Southey sparked cultural, social, political and religious controversies, and spoke forcefully to, with and about an unparalleled number of national and international communities. His correspondence therefore also sheds important new light on the Romantic period itself.