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British Library, Add MS 46362. Previously published: Martine Braekman, ‘An Unpublished Philanthropic Letter by Robert Southey’, Notes and Queries, 51.2 (June 2004), 144–146.
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.
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Southey’s spelling has not been regularized.
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I have a double reason for troubling you with a letter. First to request that you will consign the sheets of
Kehamaof it such as I trust will carry with it its own apology.
A youth of Bristol died about a year & half ago at the age of
nineteen. He spent the last weeks of a hopeless consumption in arranging & putting together his poems, & left them to two of
his friendsof more importance <necessary> than he foresaw. – His father
William I. Roberts (such was his name) was a youth of very great promise.
His verses are as good as a youths of that age can be, where there is no prematurity. I will not say that I should have advised their
publication under other circumstances, – in these it is not a matter of choice; – with a selection from his letters & a prefatory
Memoir they will form a volume sufficiently attracting for common readers & capable of affecting those of a higher class. They will
be edited by James of Birmingham, a Banker, the author of those very pretty
stanzas upon the Otaheitean Girl which were quoted in the third Quarterly Review.in
respectably – accustomed as they have been to better days, their minds are not broken down to their fortunes. – Poor fellow the first
wish of his heart was to provide for his sisters comfort, & he did not know that the support of the family would soon depend
entirely upon her. The will in which he bequeathed his verses to be published for her benefit was written a few days only before his
death, & will I am sure affect you when you see it. – I will not say any thing about their merits – (& yet they are
extraordinary relics) – if the book were worse a bad one I think you would not be unwilling to give me your assistance in
obtaining subscribers for it. Tell the story to some of your friends, for the love of charity rather than of literature, – & when
the book appears I hope you will find that I have might have ventured to say more in its commendation.