John Dawes (c. 1765-1845): Perpetual Curate of Ambleside, 1805–1845, and schoolmaster. His pupils included Hartley and Derwent Coleridge.

Jane Davy (1780-1855): Wealthy widow, socialite and distant cousin of Walter Scott. She married Humphry Davy on 11 April 1812.

Humphry Davy (1778-1829): Born in Penzance, son of Robert Davy, a woodcarver. Educated at Penzance and Truro grammar schools and apprenticed to an apothecary-surgeon in Truro. Davy had wide interests as a young man, writing poetry as well as conducting chemical experiments on the nature of heat, light and acidity. In October 1798 he went to Bristol to work for Thomas Beddoes at his Pneumatic Institution, which opened in March 1799. Davy soon became friendly with Southey and Coleridge, and they both participated in his experiments with nitrous oxide, or ‘laughing gas’.

John Davey (d. 1798): Master of Balliol College, Oxford 1785–1798.

Louisa Dauncey (dates unknown): Eldest daughter of Philip Dauncey K.C. (1759–1819) and his wife Marie (Mary) (1769–1804), daughter of Elizabeth Dolignon, who had acted in loco parentis during Southey’s time at Westminster School. Louisa married Robert Bill, an admirer of Southey’s poetry, in 1820. As Southey had known both her parents, in 1819 he wrote to her, commiserating on the death of her father, which he had read about in the newspapers.

Mrs Danvers (d. 1803): Mother of Charles Danvers. She lived at Kingsdown in Bristol and became very close to Southey when he was resident in the city in the late 1790s and 1802–1803. After her death in the influenza epidemic of 1803, Southey described her as someone ‘whom I regarded with something like a family affection.’

Charles Danvers (c. 1764-1814): Bristol wine merchant, trading under the name Danvers and White. He was distantly related to the regicides Sir John Danvers (1584/5–1655; DNB) and General Thomas Harrison (c. 1616–60; DNB) and to the diarist Celia Fiennes (1662–1741; DNB). (Southey possessed a manuscript of Fiennes diary which he had been given by the Danvers family and included unacknowledged excerpts from it in his and Coleridge’s Omniana (1812).) Danvers’ father had ‘been a person of some property’, though the family’s fortunes had since declined.

Hew Whitefoord Dalrymple, 1st Baronet (1750–1830): Army officer. In summer 1808, as commander of the British forces in Portugal, he was responsible for agreeing to the highly controversial Convention of Cintra, by which the French army, its arms and spoils were repatriated in British ships. Dalrymple was recalled to England shortly afterwards and appeared before a government-appointed board of inquiry, which determined that he be exonerated of all blame. Although he was subsequently promoted, reaching the rank of General in 1812, he never received another command.

Alexander Robert Charles Dallas (1791-1869): The son of the barrister and man of letters Robert Charles Dallas (1754–1824; DNB). In later life he became an evangelical Church of England clergyman and organiser of the Irish Church Missions to the Roman Catholics. As a young man he had served as an army officer during the Peninsular War and at Waterloo, and had composed literary and musical pieces about the Peninsular campaign.

Allan Cunningham (1784-1842): Poet, songwriter, and periodical writer. Cunningham, the son of a Dumfriesshire factor, was immersed in the literary culture of the Scottish borders. As a youth, he heard Robert Burns (1759–1796; DNB) recite and later walked in Burns’ funeral procession; visited James Hogg (who became a friend); and walked to Edinburgh to catch sight of Walter Scott. The Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song (1811), whose ‘old’ poems were actually modern compositions by Cunningham, attracted attention.