William Lisle Bowles (1762–1850): Church of England clergyman and poet, whose Fourteen Sonnets (1789) were a key contribution to the revival of the sonnet form and a major influence on Coleridge and Southey in the mid-1790s. Bowles was descended from a long line of clergymen and was educated at Winchester College and Trinity College, Oxford. He followed in his family’s tradition and was ordained. He became Vicar of Bremhill, Wiltshire in 1804, a chaplain to the Prince Regent in 1818 and a Canon of Salisbury Cathedral in 1828.

Elizabeth Browne (dates unknown): Unmarried daughter of Wade Browne by his first wife. Southey visited the family home in Ludlow when she was a young woman and later corresponded with her.

Elizabeth Browne (née Jones; dates unknown): The second wife of Wade Browne, by whom she had one daughter, Mary (1810–1892).

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).

Wade Browne (1760-1821): Wealthy woollen merchant, who was Mayor of Leeds in 1791 and 1804, Justice of the Peace and Deputy Lieutenant for Yorkshire. He retired to Ludlow in 1807 and Southey came to know him in 1808 when Browne and his family spent one of several summers in the Lakes. The two continued to correspond until Browne’s death.

John Bowring (1792-1872): Politician, diplomat and writer. He was the eldest son of the Exeter wool merchant Charles Bowring (1769–1856) and his wife Sarah Jane Anne (d. 1828). A Unitarian, he worked initially for his father’s wool business and then in the counting-house of Kennaway & Co. In 1811 he moved to London where he was employed by Milford & Co, suppliers to Wellington’s troops in the Iberian peninsula. Bowring travelled widely in Europe on company business.

John Britton (1771-1857): Antiquary and topographer, co-editor of the illustrated topographical survey, in 27 volumes, The Beauties of England and Wales (1801–1818) and editor of Architectural Antiquities of Great Britain. Southey corresponded with him about Chatterton, and Britton’s book on the latter appeared in 1813.

Manuel Abella (1753-1817): Spanish scholar, historian and archivist. He was one of the secretaries to the commission that drew up the plans for the Cortes that met in 1810 and later served in that body as a deputy from Aragon. In 1810-1811 he was in London as secretary to the Duke of Albuquerque, the Cortes’s representative in the United Kingdom. At this time, Southey (who had been given an introduction to Abella by Henry Crabb Robinson) wrote to him requesting documents that might help with accounts of the Peninsular War Southey was producing for the Edinburgh Annual Register.

John Adamson (1787-1855): Solicitor, antiquary, Portuguese scholar and leading figure in the intellectual life of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He corresponded with Southey over their shared interest in Portuguese literature and translation. His Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Luis de Camoens (1820) was greatly admired by Southey.

James Ballantyne (1772-1833): Printer and schoolfriend of Walter Scott. He printed Southey’s Madoc (1805) and many of his subsequent poems. Ballantyne’s printing business, in which Scott had a secret share, became one of the most highly regarded and profitable of the first decade of the nineteenth century. In 1809 Southey agreed to provide historical material for the Edinburgh Annual Register, issued by the related publishing firm in which Ballantyne, Scott and Ballantyne’s younger brother John were partners.