Sarah Southey (née Castle; 1782–1849): The daughter of a lawyer from Durham. She married Tom Southey in June 1810. Their nine surviving children were born between 1811–1824.

John Spedding (1770–1851): Of Mirehouse, near Keswick. A boyhood friend of Wordsworth who became a close friend of the Southey family.

George Strachey (1776–1849): Officer of the East India Company. Son of John Strachey. Educated at Westminster (adm. 1787) and Trinity College, Cambridge (BA 1795; MA 1822). Writer EICS (Madras) 1796; Assistant in the Military, Secret and Political Department, 1798; Joint Assay Master, 1807; Private Secretary to the Governor, 1808; Judge and Magistrate of the Zillah of Cuddapah, 1809; Junior Secretary to Government, 1812; Chief Secretary, 1813; retired 1824. Strachey was Southey’s ‘substance’ (an older boy assigned to induct a new pupil into school rules and rituals) at Westminster School.

Hugh Chudleigh Standert (1782–1850): Surgeon at Taunton with literary inclinations, and a friend of James Montgomery. Standert was known to Southey through the latter’s extensive family connections in Taunton and the two men occasionally corresponded.

Richard Malone, Lord Sunderlin (1738–1816): Elder brother of the Shakespeare critic, Edmond Malone (1741–1812; DNB). Sunderlin was an Irish politician, barrister and landowner, who received his title in 1785. Southey got to know Sunderlin and his family well when they visited the Lakes in 1812–1813.

James Tate (1771–1843): Schoolmaster, clergyman, and classicist. Educated at the Grammar School in Richmond, Yorkshire, and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. In 1796 he became headmaster of Richmond School and transformed it into an educational powerhouse. He rejected corporal punishment and instead attempted to enthuse pupils with his own love of learning. He published textbooks on the classics and also Horatius Restitutus (1832), which attempted to arrange the works of Horace in chronological order. Politically he was a Whig and a proponent of Catholic Emancipation.

Charles Swan (b. 1797–?1838): Writer and clergyman, whose works included Gesta Romanorum; or Entertaining Moral Stories (1824). From Morton, near Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, he attended Catherine Hall, Cambridge, matriculating in 1817. He was ordained as a deacon in 1820 and, in 1824, took up the post of Chaplain on HMS Cambrian. He published an account of his experiences as Journal of a Voyage Up the Mediterranean, Principally Among the Islands of the Archipelago and In Asia Minor, Including Many Interesting Particulars Relative to the Greek Revolution.

James Stanger (1743–1829): Member of a long-established Cumberland family, he had made a fortune in London as a partner in a firm of wholesale linen drapers and warehousemen, and bought an estate at Crosthwaite in 1810, where he built a new house called Dove Cote. He was on good terms with Southey and his family.

Henry Taylor (1800–1886): Poet and civil servant. The son of the gentleman farmer and classicist George Taylor. Southey became acquainted with the Taylors in the early 1810s via his brother Tom, who lived near them in County Durham. Taylor joined the Colonial Office in 1824, eventually rising to be senior clerk for the Carribean colonies. He married Theodosia (1818–1891), daughter of the politican Thomas Spring Rice in 1839. Taylor was a successful civil servant, knighted for his service to the Colonial Office in 1869. He managed to combine his job with a literary career.

Charles Benjamin Tayler (1797–1875): Clergyman and writer for the young. Southey wrote to him in 1820 in connection with some poems Tayler had sent him.