Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859): Writer, essayist and literary critic, best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). De Quincey was the son of a successful merchant and was born in Manchester. A brilliant scholar as a child, his schooling was erratic, and though he entered Worcester College, Oxford in 1803, he did not take his degree. A passionate admirer of Wordsworth and Coleridge, he lived at Wordsworth’s former home, Dove Cottage, Grasmere, from 1809–1819, when he came to know Southey. De Quincey married Margaret Simpson (d.

Mr and Mrs Deacon: Friends of Grosvenor Charles Bedford and his family.

Kate Deacon (dates unknown): A friend of Grosvenor Charles Bedford and his family. Daughter of Mr and Mrs Deacon.

John Dawes (c. 1765-1845): Perpetual Curate of Ambleside, 1805–1845, and schoolmaster. His pupils included Hartley and Derwent Coleridge.

Jane Davy (1780-1855): Wealthy widow, socialite and distant cousin of Walter Scott. She married Humphry Davy on 11 April 1812.

Humphry Davy (1778-1829): Born in Penzance, son of Robert Davy, a woodcarver. Educated at Penzance and Truro grammar schools and apprenticed to an apothecary-surgeon in Truro. Davy had wide interests as a young man, writing poetry as well as conducting chemical experiments on the nature of heat, light and acidity. In October 1798 he went to Bristol to work for Thomas Beddoes at his Pneumatic Institution, which opened in March 1799. Davy soon became friendly with Southey and Coleridge, and they both participated in his experiments with nitrous oxide, or ‘laughing gas’.

John Davey (d. 1798): Master of Balliol College, Oxford 1785–1798.

Louisa Dauncey (dates unknown): Eldest daughter of Philip Dauncey K.C. (1759–1819) and his wife Marie (Mary) (1769–1804), daughter of Elizabeth Dolignon, who had acted in loco parentis during Southey’s time at Westminster School. Louisa married Robert Bill, an admirer of Southey’s poetry, in 1820. As Southey had known both her parents, in 1819 he wrote to her, commiserating on the death of her father, which he had read about in the newspapers.

Mrs Danvers (d. 1803): Mother of Charles Danvers. She lived at Kingsdown in Bristol and became very close to Southey when he was resident in the city in the late 1790s and 1802–1803. After her death in the influenza epidemic of 1803, Southey described her as someone ‘whom I regarded with something like a family affection.’

Charles Danvers (c. 1764-1814): Bristol wine merchant, trading under the name Danvers and White. He was distantly related to the regicides Sir John Danvers (1584/5–1655; DNB) and General Thomas Harrison (c. 1616–60; DNB) and to the diarist Celia Fiennes (1662–1741; DNB). (Southey possessed a manuscript of Fiennes diary which he had been given by the Danvers family and included unacknowledged excerpts from it in his and Coleridge’s Omniana (1812).) Danvers’ father had ‘been a person of some property’, though the family’s fortunes had since declined.