Robert Southey was born in Bristol in 1774 and died at his home on the outskirts of
Keswick in 1843. The son of a bankrupt linen-draper, he was educated at Westminster
School and Balliol College, Oxford, which he left without taking a degree. He published
his first collection of poems in 1795 and in 1813 became Poet Laureate, a post he
held until his death. Southey was a prolific and influential poet, essayist, historian,
travel-writer, biographer, translator and polemicist, a dominant and controversial
figure in British culture from the mid-1790s through to the mid-1830s. His highly
experimental poetry, including the Islamic romance Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), paved the way for writers such as Byron, Shelley, Thomas Moore and – later
in the nineteenth century – Browning and Tennyson. His essays, histories and reviews
articulated the issues confronting a period dominated by nascent imperialism and industrialisation,
and his biographies, including the best-selling The Life of Nelson (1813), participated in and helped to form a culture increasingly concerned with celebrity.
Southey was, throughout his career, someone his contemporaries found impossible to
ignore. His ambition and ability were widely acknowledged, with Madoc (1805) praised as ‘the second heroic production in the English language’, the first
being Paradise Lost.

Yet Southey was also the butt of satire and invective, his politics, poetry and prose
attacked by opponents as diverse the Anti-Jacobin, Byron, Hazlitt and Macaulay. The Collected Letters of Robert Southey makes available for the first time complete, annotated, fully-searchable texts of
all of the surviving correspondence of this complex individual. In so doing, it allows
us to look anew at the writer described by Byron as ‘the only existing entire man
of letters’.

Southey’s final extant letter, to be published in Part Eight of this edition, also
looks back to his youth – and to the enduring nature of some of his earliest friendships.
It was sent on 6 September 1839 to Charles Watkin Williams Wynn, younger brother of
a Baronet and scion of an Anglo-Welsh, Whig political dynasty. Southey and Wynn had
been friends since their schooldays at Westminster. This final letter is a poignant
close to Southey’s epistolary career. Brief, written in an uncharacteristic, poorly-formed
hand and accompanied by an apologetic note from his second wife Caroline, it provides
eloquent testimony to the dementia that made letter writing or letter reading impossible
for the final years of Southey’s life.

Its confusion is shared by other late letters, including one to the poet and civil
servant Henry Taylor, which part-way through forgets the name and gender of its addressee
and concludes with a salutation to Bertha, Southey’s daughter.

No letters survive after late 1839 and by the time he died on 21 March 1843, Southey
had long been dead to his correspondents.

We see here the moralist and polemicist, the preacher against the evils of modernity
and the sickness spread by industrialisation, urbanisation and democracy, a Southey
familiar to the readers of both his Colloquies and his essays in the Quarterly Review. This is the man condemned by Macaulay as possessing in extraordinary measure ‘the
faculty of believing without a reason, and the faculty of hating without a provocation.’

Yet Southey is, as David Simpson has recently observed, fundamentally more ‘elusive’
and less given to ‘wholeness’ than his peers.

The stern moraliser is just one side of a complex character. Other letters disclose
a playful friend or fond, anxious parent. Here is Southey writing in 1803 about his
delight in his first child, born after nearly seven years of marriage:

Margaret’s death was a milestone. Southey and his wife immediately left their house
in Bristol for Greta Hall, Keswick, then occupied by Edith’s sister Sara, her husband
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and their three children. It was to become the Southeys’ home
for the remainder of their lives. In exchanging Bristol for the Lakes, Southey left
behind the city in which he had been born and spent much of his first three decades,
a city which by 1803 had become a spectral place, haunted by the ghosts of a dead
daughter, mother, cousin and father, and by the monitory shade of Thomas Chatterton,
summoned up by the teenaged Southey in ‘Bristol Church-Yard’, one of his earliest
surviving poems.

In heading for the Lake District, Southey also left the city and the wider geographical
region which had been at the very centre of his literary life, both as subject and
as professional hub for his dealings with other writers, publishers, printers and
booksellers. He literally put himself on the road to being tagged by his contemporaries
as a member of the ‘Lake’ school.

Southey’s correspondence brings him into sharper focus. It charts his reading, maps
his changing views on politics and society, and describes his activities as a professional
man of letters, including drafts of poems and prose works. The letters published here
contain important evidence of the labour involved in writing. They remind us that
extensive planning, research and writing lay behind many of Southey’s published works
and contain ideas for ambitious projects (such as a tragedy on the martyrdom of Joan
of Arc, poems on all the major world religions and multi-volume history of Portugal)
that never materialised. As his ‘cholera’ letter of 1831 reveals, in his private and
public lives, Southey rarely pulled his punches. The letters contain violent denunciations
of opponents, including Byron and Hazlitt, and a disturbingly detailed description
of Shelley’s corpse, washed ashore in Italy. It was, Southey noted, ‘much mutilated
... [t]he fish had half devoured it’.

Southey’s peripatetic early life ensured that he did not establish regular habits
of letter writing. He seems to have adapted the composition of letters to suit his
circumstances, writing both in solitude and in company and, on occasions, jointly
composing a letter with a family member or friend. This irregularity did not last.
After his move to Keswick in 1803, letter writing became a more regularised, solitary
occupation, pursued in Southey’s study at Greta Hall. Yet the impossibility of entirely
separating his correspondence from the rest of the household is witnessed by the traces
left, on the manuscripts that survive, by other people and other aspects of his life.
These include playful deletions or insertions in the hand of his first wife Edith;
and even the paw-prints of a kitten walking over a letter before the ink had dried.
Southey was, fortunately for the kitten, very fond of cats, in a letter of 1801 decrying
the nefarious conduct of a ‘Cat eater’, a man who had recently devoured ‘a large Tom
Cat alive’.

Southey’s prophecy that ‘Letter-writing is a favourite amusement with the young; as
men grow older they find less leisure for it ... [and] their inclination for it ceases
also’ was not fulfilled.

His correspondence increased alongside his reputation and keeping up with it had to
be fitted in alongside his work as poet, reviewer, biographer and provider for an
extended family. In his middle and later years, letter writing was reserved for the
end of the day. As Thomas De Quincey, who had seen the Poet Laureate at close quarters,
recorded:

In spite of the pressure of time, Southey took great pains over what was an important
channel of communication with friends, family and professional associates. This was
a quality recognised by Thackeray, who praised the ‘goodness and purity’ of Southey’s
‘private letters’.

Yet it is important to remember that Southey was the product of an epistolary culture
and that for him letter writing had private and public, domestic and professional
dimensions. His letters could be private documents, sent to friends and family and
intended to be read by the recipient and perhaps a close family circle. Yet they could
also be public texts, available for wider consumption. From the outset of his career,
Southey was keen to ‘correspond with the world’.

He wrote to newspapers and periodicals, sometimes, though not always, adopting a pseudonym,
and commenting on politics and culture. His signed newspaper letters could spark public
controversy. In 1799, for example, he became entangled in a debate with Sir Herbert
Croft over the latter’s exploitation of the papers of Thomas Chatterton. On 5 January
1822, he took on an even more formidable opponent, Byron, in the pages of The Courier. His advice to Byron ‘When he attacks me again let it be in rhyme’, did not quite
have the effect intended.

Byron took it, writing and publishing The Vision of Judgment (1822), with its indictment of Southey as the bard who ‘Had turn’d his coat – and
would have turn’d his skin’.

For Southey, though, the public letter was not just restricted to ephemeral publications
such as periodicals and newspapers. His first published prose work, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal (1797), exploited the public, literary potential of correspondence. It made use of
letters Southey had written to friends during his time in the Iberian peninsula, blurring
the boundaries between private and public correspondence.

Letters Written During a Short Residence went into two revised editions, in 1799 and 1808, though Southey’s plan to write a
sequel based on his second visit to Portugal in 1800-1801 came to nothing. In 1807
he returned to the epistolary travel book in a slightly different guise, publishing Letters from England under the pseudonym of Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella. Letters from England, which tapped into literary fashion, and into a culture keen to consume correspondence,
was one of Southey’s best-selling publications.

As he grew older, Southey’s sense of his own letters, including those intended only
for private consumption, as potentially public documents and as an integral part of
his legacy to posterity increased. It was a complex realisation. It could provide
him with the – somewhat self-righteous – solace that his political and cultural judgements
would be vindicated in the long term. As Southey explained to Caroline Bowles, his
correspondence with Shelley would, when published, expose Byron and his biographer
Thomas Medwin as ‘impudent’ liars.

Yet his letters, especially their potential for manipulation by the unscrupulous,
could also be a cause of anxiety.

Southey was well aware of his contemporaries’ fascination with the lives of others,
acknowledging that anyone who wanted to keep their private life private was fighting
a losing battle and that ‘in these days nothing can be kept from the joint demands
of cupidity and curiosity’.

Yet his own relationship to this culture of consumption was deeply ambiguous. He was,
after all, both a ‘personality’ and an editor of the correspondence of others. In
particular, his work on a biography and edition of William Cowper, brought him face
to face with how a writer’s correspondence could be manipulated. Southey was proud
that his life of Cowper had made extensive use of the poet’s ‘unpublished letters’
and in so doing ‘brought much to life which Hayley was not allowed to make known,
and of which none of his biographers knew any thing’. He not merely published new
information about Cowper, he also reinstated passages in individual letters that had
‘formerly been withheld’.

Yet any sense of him as a modern scholarly editor needs to be tempered with the realisation
that Southey believed not everything in a writer’s life could be revealed – that some
information needed to be suppressed and that editorial intervention was necessary.
In the case of Cowper, this included correspondence relating to the poet’s belief
that he was an androgyne.

Southey lived long enough to be in the potentially uncomfortable position of having
both his own private letters and letters written to or about him appear in print during
his own lifetime. In the 1830s, his concerns surfaced over the handling of the correspondence
and literary remains of Coleridge, who had died in 1834. Southey knew that Coleridge
had frequently attacked him in letters, both to himself and to others. The possible
publication of Coleridge’s correspondence was therefore of considerable concern to
him. He cautioned Coleridgean memoirists such as Joseph Cottle against publishing
all they knew and also kept in reserve copies of Coleridge’s letters and his own to
use ‘for my own vindication’ if the need arose.

His ultimate powerlessness in the case of Coleridge was reflected in the treatment
meted out to other Southeyan correspondences. In 1838 Robert and Samuel Wilberforce
published a life of their father, which contained tactlessly edited versions of Southey’s
letters to the abolitionist.

The Poet Laureate was not amused. As he explained to Henry Crabb Robinson:

As his reaction to the Wilberforces’ book reveals, by the late 1830s, Southey was
aware that it was impossible to control the public’s appetite for consuming his life
and letters. He resolved to manage his own posterity. In the case of his poems, Southey
took charge , ‘setting ... [his literary] house in order’ and publishing a ten-volume
collected edition.

His letters presented a different dilemma. The future editing and publication of his
massive correspondence was entrusted to a friend and disciple, the poet and civil
servant Henry Taylor, whom Southey named as his literary executor and official biographer.
The intention was that Taylor would supervise the construction of Southey’s posthumous
reputation, collecting letters and recollections from family and friends and writing
an authorized life. However, all this careful planning came to nothing. On 4 June
1839 Southey married Caroline Bowles. Shortly afterwards, his health, which had been
declining for some time, completely collapsed. As a result, a train of events was
set in motion that ruined these well-laid plans, wrecking Southey’s attempts to manage
his posterity.

Southey’s union with Bowles proved to be extremely controversial, splitting his children
and friends into bitterly opposed factions. Hostilities did not cease with the Poet
Laureate’s death on 21 March 1843. In the period immediately following, the feuding
between the pro- and anti-Bowles camps intensified to an extent that Henry Taylor’s
position soon became untenable. Having tried and failed to get cooperation from the
warring factions, Taylor resigned his post. With his departure went any plans for
an official life of the late Poet Laureate.

The result was textual chaos: competing editions of poetry, prose and correspondence
produced by family members who were often not on speaking terms with one another.
The poetical remains were divided between Southey’s son-in-law Herbert Hill and widow.
In 1845 Hill published an edition of the unfinished North American tale Oliver Newman and Other Poems, which pointedly failed to mention the second Mrs Southey. Caroline Bowles responded
with Robin Hood: A Fragment (1847), emphasising her ‘intellectual union’ with the late Poet Laureate.

The mammoth task of collecting, selecting and publishing the surviving letters split
along similarly factional lines: divided between John Wood Warter, Southey’s son-in-law
and Bowles’s chief supporter, and Cuthbert Southey, the Poet Laureate’s only surviving
son and bastion of the anti-Bowles faction.

In 1849-1850, Cuthbert published a six volume Life and Correspondence of his father, linking selections from Southey’s letters with a biographical commentary.
It is a highly problematic edition. Cuthbert not only misdated many letters, but in
order to sanitise what he believed to be the less palatable aspects of his father’s
career and opinions, he, as was customary practice at the time, censored his source
materials. His silent deletions covered Southey’s private and public lives, his views
on politics and on literature. For example, he passed over Southey’s marriage to Bowles,
whom Cuthbert loathed, and removed personal observations about friends and family,
including incautious comments on the ‘crazy humours’ of Charles Lamb and a description
of Wordworth’s letter to Mathetes as ‘a ... {mouthful} of moonshine’.

He also silently removed passages indicative of political extremism, censoring both
Southey’s earlier radicalism and his later unguarded comments against the freedom
of the press. A letter to John Rickman of 11 February 1806 was published by Cuthbert
without its opening paragraph, describing Southey’s response to the death in office
of the Prime Minister and the proposal to erect a public monument to him:

Cuthbert similarly glossed over cultural politics, omitting a description of the ‘lyer’
Byron and his sharking biographer Thomas Medwin from a letter of 1824: ‘In his Lordship
there were the motives of envy, hatred & malice at work. Evil passions possessed him.
But this fellow [ie. Medwin] has no other impulse than the desire of gain’.

Warter was a vocal and capable supporter of Caroline Bowles. He inherited her papers
after her death in 1854 and his commitment to her reputation was such that he planned
to edit a selection of the correspondence exchanged by her and Southey.

He died before this could be completed, and the project was taken up by Edward Dowden,
author of the biography of Southey in the ‘English Men of Letters’ series. In 1881
Dowden published a selected edition of The Correspondence of Robert Southey and Caroline Anne Bowles, some 199 letters exchanged between April 1818 and January 1838. A further five letters
between Southey and Shelley were included in an Appendix. Dowden’s edition is unique,
as the only attempt so far to see a Southeyan correspondence in the round by publishing
both sides. It also made a case for Bowles’s own writing as ‘worthy of remembrance’
and for the importance to Southey of their creative exchange.

Dowden was, though, highly selective. He included about ‘half’ of the surviving letters
and displayed sensitivity to surviving participants in the family feud by excluding
entirely any letters exchanged during the controversial period of Southey and Bowles’s
courtship and engagement. It was not that he had no letters to select from – evidence
of the letters Southey wrote to Bowles during this key period in their relationship
can be found in an account sent by Bowles to Anna Eliza Bray – but rather that he
chose not to include any.

The publication of Southey’s correspondence was not limited to the editions of Cuthbert,
Warter or Dowden. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, individual or groups of
Southey letters appeared on a fairly regular basis, scattered amongst autobiographies,
biographies, memoirs and accounts of his contemporaries, including Charlotte Brontë,
Anna Eliza Bray, Humphry Davy, Charles Lloyd, James Montgomery, Henry Taylor, William
Taylor and Alaric Watts. Letters, or fragments of letters, also found their way into
the footnotes of editions of the letters of Coleridge.

This dispersal of the published correspondence continued into the twentieth century.
The importance of the letters of Southey’s direct contemporaries Coleridge and Wordsworth
was recognised and enshrined with the appearance of major scholarly editions. There
was, however, no attempt to do the same for Southey and to publish all his correspondence
in one place. This does not mean that the letters were neglected entirely, rather
that Southey’s liminal position in the twentieth century Romantic canon was seen not
as justifying a collected edition. Instead, letters continued to appear in scattered
publications. In 1960 Adolfo Cabral included 63 letters in his edition of Southey’s Journals of a Residence in Portugal 1800-1801 and a Visit to France 1838. Only 22 of these had previously been unpublished, the remaining 41 were reprinted
directly from the problematic editions of Cuthbert Southey and Warter. A more substantial
attempt to fill in the blanks left by unpublished or bowdlerised letters was made
in 1965, when Kenneth Curry published a two-volume New Letters of Robert Southey. This comprised 497 letters covering Southey’s entire writing life – beginning in
1792 and ending in 1838. It included both letters published for the first time and
complete versions of ones previously censored by interventionist editors such as Joseph
Cottle or Cuthbert Southey. Curry, the leading Southey scholar of the mid-twentieth
century, also stated the case for the centrality of the correspondence for an understanding
of the man and his writing, arguing ‘it is there that [one] will find the whole range
of Southey’s life and career’.

Another new edition followed in 1976, when Charles Ramos edited a group of 170 letters
sent by Southey to his friend John May. Both Curry and Ramos’s editions added to knowledge
of Southey, but they were also both highly selective. Ramos used only the collection
of letters from Southey to May held in the University of Texas, Austin, and not the
parts of their correspondence scattered in other archives throughout the world. Curry,
meanwhile, admitted that at least 2000 Southey letters still remained unpublished
and that several hundreds more were available only in unreliable texts.

This selectivity was undoubtedly dictated by Southey’s non-canonical status and it
continued for the remainder of the twentieth century. In the three decades since the
publication of Ramos, further letters have appeared in isolated journal articles,
including essays by Lynda Pratt, Elisa Beshero-Bondar, and Martine Braekman.

The extent and importance of surviving, unpublished letters by Southey has also been
highlighted in the biographies by Mark Storey and W. A. Speck.

In the past decade Southey’s reputation has been revolutionised. His centrality to
a complex, international Romantic period culture has been recognised by critics including
Marilyn Butler, Nigel Leask, Nicholas Roe, David Simpson, Dan White, Tim Fulford,
Carol Bolton and Lynda Pratt.

Alongside the stirrings of this Southeyan critical renaissance has come the acknowledgement
of the need for scholarly editions of Southey’s poetry, prose and correspondence.
Those editions are now being produced and it is becoming once more possible to read
him. The nine-volume Poetical Works is helping to revolutionise understanding of Southey the poet.

We hope that the Collected Letters will do the same for the correspondence. The letters published here restore wholeness
to this most fragmented of Romantic period writers, providing accurate texts of letters
that were previously unpublished or available only in censored versions. Taken individually
and as a whole, the letters reveal a more complete picture of Southey’s life, literary
relationships, opinions on politics and society and development as a writer. Southey
emerges from his correspondence as a consummate – even an ‘entire’ – man of letters,
intimately involved in the culture of his time. The Collected Letters therefore both contributes to what can be called the new Southey criticism and provides
the primary material by which future scholars can take that criticism in important
fresh directions.