Material from the Romantic Circles Website may not be downloaded, reproduced or disseminated in any manner without authorization unless it is for purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, and/or classroom use as provided by the Copyright Act of 1976, as amended.
Unless otherwise noted, all Pages and Resources mounted on Romantic Circles are copyrighted by the author/editor and may be shared only in accordance with the Fair Use provisions of U.S. copyright law. Except as expressly permitted by this statement, redistribution or republication in any medium requires express prior written consent from the author/editors and advance notification of Romantic Circles. Any requests for authorization should be forwarded to Romantic Circles:>
By their use of these texts and images, users agree to the following conditions:
Users are not permitted to download these texts and images in order to mount them on their own servers. It is not in our interest or that of our users to have uncontrolled subsets of our holdings available elsewhere on the Internet. We make corrections and additions to our edited resources on a continual basis, and we want the most current text to be the only one generally available to all Internet users. Institutions can, of course, make a link to the copies at Romantic Circles, subject to our conditions of use.
British Library, Add MS 30928. Previously published: John Wood Warter (ed.), Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, 4 vols (London, 1856), I, pp. 374–377.
These letters were edited with the assistance of Carol Bolton, Tim Fulford and Ian Packer
For permission to publish the text of MSS in their possession, the editor wishes to thank the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; the Bodleian Library Oxford University; the British Library; Boston Public Library; the Syndics of Cambridge University Library; the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge; Haverford College, Connecticut; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Hornby Library, Liverpool Libraries and Information Services; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the John Rylands Library, Manchester; the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas; Luton Museum (Bedfordshire County Council); Massachusetts Historical Society; McGill University Library; the National Library of Scotland; the Newberry Library, Chicago; the New York Public Library (Pforzheimer Collections); the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; the Public Record Offices of Bedford, Suffolk (Bury St Edmunds) and Northumberland, the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne; the Trustees of the William Salt Library, Stafford, the Wisbech and Fenland Museum; the University of Virginia Library.
A research grant from the British Academy made much of the archival work possible, as did support from the English Department of Nottingham Trent University.
Any dashes occurring in line breaks have been removed.
Because of web browser variability, all hyphens have been typed on the U.S. keyboard.
Dashes have been rendered as a variable number of hyphens to give a more exact rendering of their length.
Southey’s spelling has not been regularized.
Writing in other hands appearing on these manuscripts has been indicated as such, the content recorded in brackets.
& has been used for the ampersand sign.
£ has been used for £, the pound sign
All other characters, those with accents, non-breaking spaces, etc., have been encoded in HTML entity decimals.
The date of my letter will not much surprize you after what you heard from your brother. The fact is that after consulting upon my Uncles business well with his friends in London, it was not thought necessary for me to visit Herefordshire. Bristol then became as much out of the question as out of the way – I put myself into the Carlisle mail on Saturday evening, & arrived safe & sound yesterday afternoon. The noise of the coach is still in my ears, & my solids seem to be jellified by so much shaking. but I am quite well, thank God, & heartily happy to feel myself at home, by my own fire side, & once more in my Cumberland costume.
London never agreed with me so ill – I caught a severe cold & cough, & felt my breathing much affected by that
cursed composition of smoke, dust, smuts, human breath, & marsh vapour, which passes for an atmosphere in the metropolis. For ten
days I was unwell enough to render it quite prudent to abstain from animal food & all fermented liquors; so wherever I went I dined
upon fish & vegetables like a Catholic in Lent, & drank water as rigidly as a Turk. It served me also as an excuse for refusing
invitations which I had no wish to accept, so I past much part of my time at home, that is at Rickmans, & usually got to bed at my own right seasonable hour, as soon as the clock
struck ten. Mrs Rickman is a very good natured woman, who made the hours quite
pleasant to me. I was left at perfect liberty, & no difference was made in the domestic arrangement whether I dined there or
abroad. John the boy,xxx call him – from running
after a butterfly in the garden, picking snails, playing with the cat, or quarrelling with the maid, who is an Ogress, & beats him
with the fire shovel. Mrs R. has sent my daughter a silver cup; it is curious
enough that her godmother Mrs Gonne had just sent her another, & that she had one
already given by Mrs Smith
I dined at Dr Aikins on Sunday the fourth. he was then full of the
quarrel with Phillips – of which you will have learnt the results by the
statement in the papers that he is no longer connected with the M. Magazine.x was only suspended till a fit editor could be found. So the
Dr will arrange his matters with Our Fathers [who are] in the
Row, & I suppose the new Magazine will start with the [new] year – in which case I must lend a helping hand for a while,
& give a hearty shove at the set off.
In examining my accounts in the Row I find that my profits upon Madoc
amount to three pounds, seventeen shillings, & one penny. there remain about 180 copies on hand, each of which when sold will
produce me fifteen shillings, but it will be long before they drop off, if ever they do during my life. However we shall print a small
edition in two volumes without loss of time; in which there will be no alterations, that the quarto may retain its full value, in
wh[ich] case it will still find some purchasers who like to pay for good margins, & fill quarto shelves.
Sir Dominie has past his examination, & will be doctored about midsummer.