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.

Benjamin West (1738–1820): Painter. Born in Pennsylvania, the son of an innkeeper, West travelled to Italy in 1760 and England in 1763, remaining there for the rest of his life. Although he worked in a number of genres, West became best known, first, as a history painter and, later in his career, as a painter of religious subjects. His works included, Agrippina Landing at Brundisium with the Ashes of Germanicus (1768) and The Departure of Regulus from Rome (1769), the latter commissioned by George III.

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.

William Westall (1781–1850): Painter and engraver, whose works played an important role in the shaping of Romantic ideas of the landscape. He was the half brother of the academician Richard Westall (1765–1836; DNB). In 1801 he was appointed as the landscape draughtsman for the voyage to New Holland and the South Seas commanded by Matthew Flinders. His travels eventually also took him to Canton and Bombay. He arrived back in England in 1805 and was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society later that year. He held exhibitions of his foreign views in 1808 and 1809.

John Taylor (1781–1864): Publisher and writer. Born in Retford, Nottinghamshire, he was the son of the bookseller James Taylor (1752–1823) and his wife Sarah (b. 1760). Educated at Lincoln and Retford grammar schools, he moved to London in 1803, where he worked in the publishing and bookselling trade. In 1806 he set up his own business with James Augustus Hessey (1785–1870). The firm’s staple fare was sermons, moral tracts and homilies.

Thomas Telford (1757–1834): Civil engineer and architect. The son of a shepherd from Eskdale, Dumfriesshire, he was apprenticed to a stonemason at the age of fourteen and taught himself how to design and manage building projects. Telford made his name as Surveyor of Public Works in Shropshire, where he built the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct over the River Dee (1805).

William Taylor (1765–1836): Reviewer and translator. Born in Norwich, the only child of William and Sarah Taylor. Taylor’s interest in German culture culminated in his Historic Survey of German Poetry (1828–1830). He was also a prolific contributor to the Annual Review, The Athenaeum, Monthly Magazine, and Monthly Review. Southey and Taylor met in 1798, whilst the former was on a visit to Great Yarmouth, where his brother Henry Herbert Southey was being tutored by George Burnett.

John Thelwall (1764–1834): Political radical, poet and erstwhile friend of Coleridge. Arrested on a charge of treason in 1794, Thelwall became first a farmer at Llyswen, Wales, then a speech therapist, journalist and itinerant lecturer on elocution. He remained a Radical but faded from the forefront of the political scene after the 1790s. Though they came to disagree on politics, Southey retained a good deal of affection for Thelwall.

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 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.