George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (1788-1824): Best-selling poet. His father, John Byron (1757–1791), was an army officer who squandered the inheritance of Byron’s mother, Catherine Gordon. At the age of ten, Byron inherited the title of Baron Byron of Rochdale and Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire from his great-uncle. Byron was educated at Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge, and composed poetry from childhood. His attacks on his contemporaries (including Southey) in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) made him well-known, despite the work’s anonymity.

Eleanor Charlotte Butler (1739-1829): One of the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’. Butler was an Anglo-Irish woman who, despite family disapproval, in 1780 set up house with Sarah Ponsonby at Plas Newydd, on the outskirts of Llangollen, North Wales. Their relationship fascinated contemporaries and has continued to attract speculation. Although the Ladies were famed for their lifestyle of retirement, simplicity and self-improvement, they received many guests – both admirers and tourists. Southey visited in 1811.

Derwent Coleridge (1800-1883): Third son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Sarah Fricker; and Southey’s nephew. Anglican clergyman, writer and educationist. First Principal of St Mark’s teacher training college in Chelsea 1841–1864.

Catherine Clarkson (née Buck; 1772-1856): A native of the Suffolk town of Bury St Edmunds, she married Thomas Clarkson in 1796. She shared his radicalism and became close friends with the Wordsworths, Southey, Coleridge and Crabb Robinson. Owing to her illness, she was treated by Beddoes in Bristol in 1804 and 1805; she and her husband moved south to Suffolk from the Lake District for the sake of her health in 1806.

Willem de Clercq (1795-1844): Poet and important figure in the Réveil, the anti-modernist spiritual revival in the Dutch Reformed Church of the Netherlands, which also included de Clercq’s friend, Willem Bilderdijk. He was born in Amsterdam, the child of wealthy grain merchants and studied French, German and Greek with the intention of becoming a preacher, but his ambitions were thwarted by the French invasion of 1813.

(David) Hartley Coleridge (1796-1849): Eldest son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Sarah Fricker; and Southey’s nephew, nicknamed ‘Job’ for his seriousness as a child. Southey played a considerable part in Hartley’s upbringing after his father separated from his mother, leaving his children in Southey’s care at Greta Hall. In 1808 Hartley was sent to Ambleside School and in 1815 Southey was able to organise sufficient donations from friends and family to allow Hartley to proceed to Merton, College, Oxford.

Henry Colburn (1784/5-1855): One of the leading publishers of the first half of the nineteenth century. After setting up in business in 1806 he became well-known for promoting popular fiction, including ‘silver fork’ society novels, naval adventures and historical novels. He also had an interest in numerous periodicals, including the New Monthly Magazine, the Literary Gazette and the Athenaeum, and gained a reputation for ‘puffing’ his own authors in their pages.

Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846): Campaigner for the abolition of the slave trade, and a friend of the Wordsworths, Coleridge and Southey. He moved to the Lake District in 1794 and lived in retirement at Eusemere, near Pooley Bridge, Ullswater, until 1806. Clarkson and his wife returned to her native Suffolk in 1806, and remained there until his death. He returned to the campaign against the slave trade in 1804 and wrote ceaselessly in the cause until the passing of the 1833 Act abolishing slavery in the British empire. He also wrote admiringly of the Quakers.

William Cobbett (1763-1835): A journalist whose weekly paper, the Political Register, took an anti-jacobinical line until 1804, but thereafter became progressively more radical, supporting Burdett at the Westminster election of 1807. From 1810 to 1812 he was imprisoned after being prosecuted by the government for criticising flogging in the militia. Cobbett’s political development was the exact opposite of Southey’s and Southey was a consistent critic of Cobbett.

Charlotte Broome (1761-1838): Daughter of the musicologist Charles Burney (1726–1814; DNB) and his first wife Esther Sleepe (d. 1762), and younger sister of the novelist Fanny Burney (1752–1840; DNB) and of Southey’s friend James Burney. She married, firstly, the physician Clement Francis (c. 1744–1792) and, secondly, the stockjobber, pamphleteer and poet Ralph Broome (1742–1805). In 1818 Broome asked Southey for a poem commemorating her younger son Ralph Broome (1801–1817).