John Kenyon (1784–1856): Kenyon was a very wealthy man. On the death of his father, John Kennion (d. c. 1792), he inherited a share in the sugar-producing estate of Chester in Trelawny, Jamaica, and the two hundred enslaved persons who worked the estate. Though he was born in the West Indies he left as a child and was educated at Charterhouse and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He lived mostly in the West Country and then London, though he also travelled a great deal. Kenyon’s first wife, Susannah Wright, died in Naples in 1818 and he married Caroline Curties (d. 1835) in 1821. Southey first met Kenyon when the latter was visiting the Lake District in 1804 and regarded Kenyon as ‘one of the very best & pleasantest men whom I have even known’. Kenyon published poetry, e.g. A Day at Tivoli with Other Verses (1849) and was well known for his generosity, especially to literary figures. He contributed to the costs of Derwent Coleridge’s education and was later a patron of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (a cousin) and Robert Browning, whom he introduced to each other. Southey and Kenyon did not meet often, though sometimes they encountered each other in surprising places – e.g. at Helen Maria Williams’s salon in Paris in May 1817. The two men remained on friendly terms for the rest of Southey’s life; Kenyon located a copy of Martin Dobrizhoffer’s Historia de Abiponibus (1784) for Southey in 1817, after Southey had fruitlessly searched for the book for ten years, and Southey took extraordinary pains to mobilise support to ensure Kenyon was elected to the Athenaeum Club in 1827. Kenyon was one of the party who accompanied Southey on his final tour of France in 1838.