Robert Rouse (fl. 1820s): Clerk in the East India Company, working in its ‘Private Trade Warehouse’ in Leadenhall Street. Southey corresponded with him in 1826, when Rouse acted as an intermediary for someone offering Southey sight of previously unused letters that shed light on John Wesley (1703–1791; DNB).

Robert Rosser (d. 1802): Bristol-based printer. Best known for printing the Bristol Mercury.

Susan Reeve (1788–1853): The daughter of the Unitarian hymn-writer, minister and manufacturer John Taylor (1750–1826; DNB) and his wife Susanna (1755–1823; DNB). She married Reeve in 1807. Of their three children, only one survived infancy: Henry Reeve (1813–1895; DNB), later editor of the Edinburgh Review.

William Roscoe (1753–1831): Lawyer, banker and leading public figure in his native Liverpool, which he represented in parliament 1806–1807. Roscoe was a Unitarian and a radical. He was also an expert on Italian history and literature and collected a notable library and series of Italian paintings, as well as writing The Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici (1796). He corresponded with Southey in 1798 on the whereabouts of William Gilbert.

Henry Reeve (1780–1814): Physician. A native of Hadleigh, Suffolk, he became acquainted with Henry Herbert Southey while studying under the Norwich surgeon Philip Meadows Martineau in 1796–1800. He proceeded to Edinburgh University in 1800–1803, a move that probably inspired Henry Herbert Southey’s decision to attend Edinburgh. After a prolonged Continental tour in 1805–1806, he set up practice in Norwich.

Lupton Relfe (1798–1845): Publisher, based at 13, Cornhill, London, and son of the musician Lupton Relfe (d. 1805). Relfe started his firm in about 1822 and brought out the early numbers (1823–1827) of the annual Friendship’s Offering. Southey, who contributed poems to the 1826, 1827, 1828 and 1829 issues, corresponded with Relfe in a professional capacity.

Susannah Rickman (née Postlethwaite; d. 1836): Married John Rickman in 1805.

London booksellers and publishers. George Robinson (1736–1801; DNB) and his brothers James Robinson (d. 1803/4; DNB), John Robinson (1753–1813; DNB), and possibly Henry Robinson (d. in or after 1813; DNB).

James Horace Rudge (1785–1852): Church of England clergyman, educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and ordained in 1808. He held a number of clerical appointments, including, from 1809, the post of Lecturer at St Anne’s, Limehouse, London, chaplain to various members of the royal family and Rector of Hawkchurch, Devon 1828–1852. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1814.

William Ross (d. 1873): Worked in the calico printing trade and in the mid-1820s was employed by the Manchester-based firm John Dugdale & Brothers. In 1832 he set up his own firm, Potter & Ross, in Darwen, in partnership with Charles Potter (1802–1872), and later became Vice-President of the Salford Mechanics Institute. In 1840 he gave evidence to the Parliamentary Select Committee on the Copyright of Designs. Ross retired in 1847 and was twice Mayor of Salford (1853–1854 and 1854–1855).