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.
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.
George Taylor (1772–1851): Gentleman farmer, classicist and occasional contributor to the Quarterly Review. Taylor lived in County Durham and became acquainted with Southey through the latter’s brother, Tom. His son, Henry Taylor, later became a close friend of Southey’s and his literary executor.
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.
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.
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.
Philippa Elizabeth Dorothy Malone, Lady Sunderlin (née Rooper; 1745–1831): Daughter of Godolphin Rooper (1709–1790) of Berkampstead, she married Lord Sunderlin in 1778. The couple had no children.
Daniel Stuart (1766–1846): Newspaper proprietor and journalist. Originally a printer, he bought the Morning Post in 1795 and turned it into the leading anti-government newspaper and a very profitable venture. Though he sold the Morning Post in 1803, he retained an interest in the Courier, which he acquired in 1800–1801, though it is disputed how much influence he had over the newspaper’s contents. Stuart employed Southey to write poems for the Morning Post at a guinea a week in 1798–1799, and again in 1801–1803.
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.
