Mary Morgan (née Brent; b. 1782): The wife of one of Southey’s oldest friends, John James Morgan. She was the daughter of Moses Brent (d. 1817), a silversmith, and had married John James Morgan in 1800.

John James Morgan (d. 1820): Businessman. His friendship with Southey dated from their time as pupils at Williams’ School, Bristol. From 1810–1816, Morgan and his wife took in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and attempted to cure him of his opium addiction. When Morgan’s finances collapsed in 1819, Southey, Charles Lamb and other friends contributed to an annuity for him.

Hannah More (1745–1833): Writer, educationist and conservative. More was born in Bristol, where her father, Jacob More (1700–1783) founded a series of schools. More taught in these schools until an annuity she received as compensation from her ex-fiancée for breaking off their engagement allowed her to concentrate on literature. Her first efforts were pastoral plays, and from 1773–1774 onwards she visited London regularly and became well-known in literary circles.

Thomas Moore (1779–1852): Irish poet, playwright, and satirist, who in later life turned to writing biography, including a life of his friend Byron, whose Whig politics he shared. As a poet Moore achieved commercial success with his Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little (1801); subsequent volumes included Irish Melodies (1808–1834), Intercepted Letters, or, The Twopenny Post-Bag (1813), and The Fudge Family in Paris (1818).

Edward Moor (1771–1848): Army officer and writer. He served in the army of the East India Company, rising to the rank of Major. After retiring back to his home county of Suffolk due to ill health, he produced the Hindu Pantheon (1810), which for over fifty years was the only authoritative book in English on the subject, and thus widely consulted. Other publications included Hindu Infanticide: an Account of the Measures Adopted for Suppressing the Practice (1811), Oriental Fragments (1834), and Suffolk Words and Phrases (1823).

James Montgomery (1771–1854): A radical journalist and poet. His father was a Moravian pastor and missionary and Montgomery was educated at the Moravian school at Fulneck, near Leeds. He was the editor of the Sheffield Iris newspaper from 1794 to 1825, and was twice imprisoned in the 1790s for publishing articles critical of the authorities. He authored The Wanderer of Switzerland (1807), a poem severely criticised in the Edinburgh Review (Southey sympathised).

Basil Montagu (1770–1851): Lawyer and author, illegitimate son of John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich (1718–1792; DNB) and the actress Martha Ray (d. 1779; DNB). Montague, like Southey, was a member of Gray’s Inn, and was called to the Bar in 1798. He was a friend of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and in 1795 Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, undertook the upbringing of his two-year old son, Basil (1793–1830), by his first wife who had died in childbirth in 1793. His second marriage, in 1806, was to Laura Rush (d. 1806). Like his first wife, she died in childbirth.

Anna Dorothea Montagu (née Benson; 1773–1856): A former friend of Robert Burns, the widow of Thomas Skepper, a lawyer in York, and daughter of Edward Benson, a York wine merchant. She was Mary Barker’s friend, and married Basil Montagu in 1808.

John Mitford (1781–1859): Suffolk clergyman, who took little interest in his parochial duties but played an important role in London literary life. He was a noted editor (especially of the works of Thomas Gray), editor of the Gentlemans Magazine 1834–1850, and close friend of Samuel Rogers and Bernard Barton. In 1810 he wrote to Southey for advice about his poem, Agnes, the Indian Captive (1811).

George Mitford (1760–1842): Educated at Edinburgh University he practised briefly as a surgeon and in later life assumed the unauthorised title of ‘Doctor’. He married Mary Russell (1750–1830), a distant and wealthy relation of the Dukes of Bedford. Their only child was the writer Mary Russell Mitford (1787–1855; DNB). Mitford’s inverate gambling, social pretensions and extravagant expenditure brought his family close to ruin on several occasions. Southey wrote to Mitford in 1812 to acknowledge receipt of copies of works by Mary Russell Mitford.