Margaret Charlotte Scott (née Carpenter; 1770–1826): Walter Scott’s wife.

Walter Scott (1771–1832): Poet and novelist. Scott and Southey first met in October 1805, when their mutual interest in chivalric romances brought them together. Scott reviewed Southey’s Amadis of Gaul in the Annual Review, and The Chronicle of the Cid and The Curse of Kehama in the Quarterly Review, while Southey reviewed Scott’s Sir Tristram in the Annual.

Poet and scholar. Sayers was born in London but after his father died when Sayers was a child, he spent his early years mainly in Suffolk and Norfolk. Sayers inherited a small estate from his grandfather in 1778 and qualified as a doctor in the Netherlands but decided to concentrate on literature from 1789 onwards. He settled in Norwich and became a central figure in the city’s intellectual life – William Taylor was an old schoolfriend.

Mary Sawier (d. before April 1798): The widow of a Bristol accountant and Southey’s landlady in College Street, Bristol in 1795. Her daughter married James Jennings.

Simon Saunders (1783–1861) and John Edward Otley (1798–1857) formed a partnership in 1824 as a London firm of publishers and booksellers, mainly publishing novels. They wrote to Southey in 1827, offering him the editorship of a new journal to challenge the Quarterly Review. Southey eventually declined the offer. The proposed new journal was not launched.

John Sandford (1801–1873): Anglican clergyman. He held a long series of posts, rising to be Archdeacon of Coventry in 1861, and wrote widely on Church matters and social issues. His first wife, Elizabeth Poole (d. 1853), was the niece of Southey’s old friend from Somerset, Thomas Poole, and was herself a well-known writer on women’s issues, including On Female Improvement (1836).

Edward Rushton (1756–1814): Liverpool poet, journalist and anti-slavery campaigner, blinded in 1773 while assisting suffering Africans on board a slave ship. Southey met him in 1808.

John Rumney (1796–1861): Surgeon and Deputy Postmaster of Brough, Westmorland 1815–1844. He was an old friend of Tom Southey, from Tom’s days farming in the Brough area, and acted as the midwife at the birth of some of his children. Robert Southey wrote to him in 1822 asking for assistance in sorting out an incorrect invoice.

James Horace Rudge (1785–1852): Church of England clergyman, educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and ordained in 1808. He held a number of clerical appointments, including, from 1809, the post of Lecturer at St Anne’s, Limehouse, London, chaplain to various members of the royal family and Rector of Hawkchurch, Devon 1828–1852. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1814.

Robert Rouse (fl. 1820s): Clerk in the East India Company, working in its ‘Private Trade Warehouse’ in Leadenhall Street. Southey corresponded with him in 1826, when Rouse acted as an intermediary for someone offering Southey sight of previously unused letters that shed light on John Wesley (1703–1791; DNB).