Mary Southey (1750–1838): Southey’s paternal aunt, also referred to as ‘Aunt Maria’. Whereas Southey was on poor terms with his surviving paternal uncles, John and Thomas, he was on excellent terms with their sister. Mary Southey lived in Taunton, Somerset. After 1803 she provided important links between her nephew and his regional roots, and Southey stayed with her on his visits to the West Country. Mary, like her nephews, suffered from her two brothers’ lack of familial feeling.

Margaret Edith Southey (1802–1803): The first-born child of Robert and Edith Southey, who both doted on her. She died of hydrocephalus in August 1803.

Margaret Southey (b. 1811): Eldest child of Tom Southey and his wife Sarah. Born 7 March 1811.

Margaret Southey (1752–1802): Southey’s mother. Born Margaret Hill, she married Robert Southey Senior in 1772. The marriage produced nine children, of whom five died young. She was dominated by her older half-sister, Elizabeth Tyler, with whom Southey spent a great deal of his childhood. After the bankruptcy and death of her husband in 1792, Margaret moved to Bath, running a boarding house in Westgate Buildings. Her continued financial difficulties — possibly exacerbated by the extravagance of her half-sister — caused Southey great anxiety.

Louisa Southey (née Gonne; d. 1830): Daughter of Southey’s old Lisbon friends, the Gonnes, and second wife of Henry Herbert Southey. They married on 21 August 1815. Louisa died giving birth to their tenth child.

Katharine (‘Kate’) Southey (1810–1864): Sixth child of Robert and Edith Southey. She did not marry and in her later years lived at Lairthwaite Cottage in Keswick with her aunt, Mary Lovell.

John Cannon Southey (1743–1806): The eldest brother of Southey’s father, who lived at Taunton, Somerset. His work as a lawyer led to him accumulating a substantial fortune of £100,000. Although he was unmarried, he refused to help either Robert Southey Senior, thus ensuring the latter’s imprisonment for debt in 1792, or his nephews, to whom he left nothing in his Will. Southey visited his uncle in 1802, describing his miserly existence to John May. In 1806, he recorded that his uncle ‘had thanked God upon his death bed that he had cut me off’.

Isabel Southey (1812–1826): Southey’s youngest daughter.

Herbert Southey (1806–1816): Southey’s first son, a boy of great intellectual promise.

Henry Herbert Southey (1784–1865): Physician. Southey’s younger brother. With the help of his uncle Herbert Hill, Southey provided money for Henry Herbert’s education at Norwich and Edinburgh. His concerns about his younger brother’s lack of application proved — eventually — to be ill-founded, and in later life the two enjoyed a close friendship. Henry graduated MD on 24 June 1806, producing, with Southey’s help, a dissertation on the origins and course of syphilis which suggested an American origin for the disease.