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.
Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin. Previously published: Charles Ramos, The Letters of Robert Southey to John May: 1797–1838 (Austin, Texas, 1976), pp. 64-66.
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.
All quotation marks and apostrophes have been changed: " for “," for ”, ' for ‘, and ' for ’.
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.
My dear friend
The parcel reached me safely. By the letters contained in it, I
learn that by the same ship (The Hero of the Nile. Capt.
Phelps –
With regard to the immediate subject of your letter – you are
very good – & I think agree with you &
Wm Taylor
on the propriety of sending the £50 without delay. as soon as I can get it from
Thomass Executors it
shall be remitted to you. I learn that his widow
My connection with Mr Corry is I conceive at an end, tho I have had no
regular intimation that my services are no longer necessary. he hinted to Rickman that I should turn tutor to
his son.s that inconvenience –
& besides when I am settling – perhaps permanently – I would not get out quite away from those friends in whose
intimacy I have grown up.
You ask me for Miss Burkesrs
Trenther & an account of
her death spread. She had contrived to get down a flight of steps from her
prison-room when Miss Power heard her. the night of her death Jane Power sate
with her very late seeing how dispirited she was – so late that the lamp went
out in the cloisters & she lay down on a stone bench lest by mistake she
should enter a wrong cell in the dark. she went back at day light to tell her
friend how she had past the night & found her with her throat cut. At that
sight she dropt & was found in a fit in the door way by those who came to
bring their prisoner food. this is the story – the
manner by which <how> Jane Power got at her I do not understand.
It should be remembered that there is no reason to suspect this as the invention
& calumny of a renegade. Jane Power continues a Catholic – & her friends
are procuring her a dispensation from Rome to quiet her conscience & their
own.
Mr Corrys conduct
towards me has been a riddle – & I think I have at last discovered the
solution. he wanted a tutor of notoriety for his son – & meant to pay him
with the money of the nation.
Edith desires to be remembered.