Thomas Wedgwood (1771–1805): Chemist. Third son of the potter Josiah Wedgwood (1730–1795; DNB). He inherited a substantial fortune of the death of his father and dedicated this to supporting writers and scientists. He was a patron of Beddoes’ Pneumatic Medical Institution and of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He participated in Davy’s Bristol experiments with nitrous oxide and later attended his lectures at the Royal Institution.

William Webb (c. 1771–1845): Deputy Commissary-General in the British Army. Webb had written to Southey in 1817 to defend the quality of the horses sent out to Portugal in 1808 to pull the British Army’s artillery and Southey had included Webb’s defence at History of the Peninsular War, 3 vols (London, 1823–1832), I, pp. 554–555. The poor quality of the artillery horses was one of the reasons given for British forces not advancing after their victory in the Battle of Vimeiro (1808). In 1824 he solicited Southey’s advice on finding a publisher.

Alaric Alexander Watts (1797–1864): Journalist and poet. Born in London, he was the youngest son of John Mosley Watts and his wife Sarah. His parents separated when he was very young and a lengthy suit in Chancery followed. He was educated at Wye College Grammar School, Kent, and then at a school in Ashford. After that he held a variety of posts, including usher, private tutor, clerk and assistant teacher. By the late 1810s he was determined on a literary career and from January to June 1819 edited the New Monthly Magazine.

Elijah Waring (c. 1788–1857): Writer. Born in Alton, Hampshire, he was the son of Jeremiah Waring. He moved to Wales in c. 1810, living in Swansea and then Neath. He established the short-lived English-language periodical The Cambrian Visitor: A Monthly Miscellany in 1813. In 1817 he married Deborah (c. 1786–1867), sister of the prominent Quaker ironmaster and philanthropist Joseph Tregelles Price (1784–1854; DNB). Waring himself later abandoned Quakerism and joined the Wesleyan Methodists.

John Ware (1754–1820): Founding owner, printer and editor of the Cumberland Pacquet and Ware’s Whitehaven Advertiser 1774–1820. Southey sent the newspaper a letter in 1819 in protest at Henry Brougham’s campaign against the government’s support of the Manchester magistrates over their actions in the ‘Peterloo Massacre’ of 1819.

Joseph Antoine Walwein de Tervliet (dates unknown): Librarian of the Public Library in Ghent, 1810–1818. Southey corresponded with him in 1815 as part of his book-buying activities during his tour of Belgium.

William Sidney Walker (1795–1846): Literary scholar. Born at Pembroke, he was educated at Eton and the University of Cambridge, where he won the Craven Scholarship (1817) and Porson prize for Greek verse (1818). He was elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1820. Religious doubts made it impossible for him to proceed to ordination and led to the resignation of his Fellowship in 1829. From then until the end of his life, Walker lived off annuities from Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802–1839; DNB), an old friend, and from Trinity, his old college.

Gilbert Wakefield (1756–1801): Radical writer. Born in Nottingham, the son of George Wakefield, Rector of St Nicholas’s Church. He attended Jesus College, Cambridge, graduating with a BA in 1776. Wakefield was a Fellow of the College 1776–1779 and a deacon 1778–1779. But he resigned the former post on his marriage and the latter on his conversion to Unitarianism. Thereafter he was a teacher (at Warrington Dissenting Academy 1779–1783) and a professional writer, mainly on classical, religious and political topics.

William Vincent (1739–1815): Head Master of Westminster School 1778–1802 and later Dean of Westminster. A Tory, in 1792 he used a public sermon at St Margaret’s, Westminster, to defend the constitution and the prevailing social order. He published works on the geography and commerce of the classical world.

Thomas Vardon (c. 1758-1836): Iron merchant and manufacturer in Greenwich, where he was a partner in the Crowley works and an important supplier to the Royal Navy. Vardon met Southey on his tour of the Netherlands in 1815. They had a mutual friend in John William Knox (1784–1862) and Vardon also knew the family of the wife of Southey’s old Westminster friend, Charles Collins.