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.

Emma Southey (1808–1809): Southey’s third daughter.

Eliza Southey (1776–1779): Southey’s younger sister.

Edward Southey (1788–1847): Southey’s youngest brother, he spent much of his childhood in the household of Elizabeth Tyler. Southey was much preoccupied with arranging Edward’s education, though plans to send him to St Paul’s School did not work out. It is not certain where he was educated. Southey despaired, noting ‘I never saw a lad with a better capacity or with habits more compleatly bad’. Edward was to lead an increasingly rackety, disreputable life, trying his hand at being a sailor, soldier and, eventually, a provincial actor.