About this Edition

Editorial Methodology

The Collected Letters of Robert Southey is divided into eight Parts: I: 1791-1797, II:1798-1803, III:1804-09, IV:1810-15, V:1816-21, VI:1822-27, VII:1828-33, VIII:1833-39.

The General Introduction outlines the project’s research context. In addition, each individual Part has a brief introductory essay and a chronology covering key events in Southey’s life.

Throughout the edition, letters are presented in chronological order, each letter being assigned its own number. Unpublished letters have all been newly transcribed from manuscript. Where letters have been previously published, we have returned to and transcribed the original manuscript when it survives. In cases where we have been unable to locate the manuscript of a published letter, copy-text is taken from the published version and this is recorded in the editorial headnote.

All letters are transcribed in full and editorial intervention in the text has been kept to a minimum. Southey’s original spelling, and mis-spelling, grammar and punctuation has been retained. Deletions are indicated by striking through the deleted word or phrase, but without any attempt to indicate the heaviness of the deletion: e.g. ‘he said’. Throughout the text, ‘x’ is used to indicate an illegible character: e.g. ‘he xxid’. Underlining is indicated by italics: e.g. ‘he said’. Editorial [...] within the text of an individual letter are used to indicate issues relating to the manuscript: a tear, cut, missing section or area obscured by a seal mark or blot, or a substantial section of a letter in the hand of a co-correspondent. See, for example, Letter 56, co-written with Grosvenor Charles Bedford. Editorial <...> are used to indicate an authorial insertion of text above or below the line.

Each letter has an editorial headnote which records the manuscript location and any previous instances of publication. It also deals with other relevant issues, such as endorsements, watermarks, postmarks, franks, stamps and dating. This edition provides important new information about when many of Southey’s letters were actually written, and re-dates letters that have been misdated or misleadingly dated by previous editors. For example, Southey’s earliest correspondence is here demonstrated to date to late 1791, rather than 1790 as claimed by John Wood Warter. The following conventions have been observed in dating individual letters: [...] is used in headnotes to indicate an editorial dating; ‘c.’ to indicate a dating taken from the postmark or from internal evidence within an individual letter; ‘before’ is used either when a letter contains an authorial date, but there is evidence within the letter that it was begun before that time, or when an endorsement on the letter indicates its date of receipt; ‘after’ is used when a letter contains an authorial date, but there is evidence within the letter that it was continued after that time; ‘?’ is used to indicate a dating about which there remains some uncertainty.

Detailed information about Southey’s correspondents, along with other important figures in his letters, can be found in the ‘Biographies’ section. Information about where Southey lived and the homes of friends which he visited is provided in the ‘Places’ section of this edition.

Editorial notes to the text are used to clarify references to persons, books, places, and events within the main body of each individual letter. They also identify quotations and provide translations of foreign language material.

People

Lynda Pratt is Professor of Modern Literature and Director of the Centre for Regional Literature and Culture at the University of Nottingham. She has published widely on Southey and his circle. She was general editor of Robert Southey: Poetical Works, 1793-1810, 5 vols (2004) and is co-general editor, with Tim Fulford, of the forthcoming Robert Southey: Later Poetical Works, 1811-1838, 4 vols (Pickering and Chatto, 2011). Her edited collection Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism was published in 2006.

Tim Fulford is a Professor of English at Nottingham Trent University. He has published several monographs in which Southey features, most recently Romantic Indians (2006). He edited Thalaba the Destroyer, vol. 3 of Robert Southey: Poetical Works, 1793-1810 (2004) and is co-general editor, with Lynda Pratt, of the forthcoming Robert Southey: Later Poetical Works, 1811-1838. Fulford and Pratt's edition the Collected Letters of Robert Bloomfield and his Circle is also online at Romantic Circles

Ian Packer is Reader in History at the University of Lincoln. His publications include The Letters of Arnold Stephenson Rowntree to Mary Katherine Rowntree (Cambridge 2002). He has published widely on political and religious history and is an editor on Robert Southey: Later Poetical Works, 1811-1838.

Carol Bolton is Lecturer in English at Loughborough University. Her monograph Writing the Empire: Robert Southey and Romantic Colonialism was published in 2007. She has published widely on Romantic period writing and is an editor on Robert Southey: Later Poetical Works, 1811-1838.

W. A. Speck is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Leeds and Special Professor in the School of English Studies at the University of Nottingham. His Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters was published by Yale University Press in 2006.

Averill Buchanan is an AHRC-funded research fellow on The Collected Letters of Robert Southey and is based at the University of Nottingham. She completed an AHRC-funded PhD at Queen’s University Belfast in 2004 on the Anglo-Irish writer Mary Tighe. Her monograph Mary Tighe, 1772-1810: The Irish Psyche is contracted to Ashgate and will be published in 2011.

Sam Ward is an AHRC-funded research fellow on The Collected Letters of Robert Southey and is based at the University of Nottingham. He completed an AHRC-funded PhD at Nottingham Trent University in 2006. He has published peer-reviewed essays on John Clare John and Robert Bloomfield. His research interests also include James Montgomery.

Contact

The editors welcome comments and corrections. Please contact:

Lynda Pratt: Lynda.Pratt@nottingham.ac.uk

Permissions

The editors thank the following for permission to reproduce manuscripts in their collections:

North America

Beinecke Library, Yale University; The Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; The Trustees of the Boston Public Library, Rare Books; Brown University Library; Special Collections Department, Bryn Mawr College Library; The Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York; The Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library; Duke University Library; Special Collections, The John Hopkins University; Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin; Hispanic Society of America, New York; Houghton Library, Harvard University; Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Huntington Library, San Marino; The Lilly Library, Indiana University; Special Collections, University of Kentucky Libraries; McLennan Library, Autograph Letter Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library; Morgan Library, New York; New York Public Library (General Manuscript collection); Pforzheimer Collection, New York Public Library; Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library; Department of Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester; Spencer Library, University of Kansas; Tulane University Library; Victoria University Library, Toronto.

United Kingdom

Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; Bristol City Library, Bristol; British Library, London; Brotherton Library, Leeds University; The Principal and Fellows of Newnham College, Cambridge; City of London Corporation, London Metropolitan Archives; Liverpool Record Office; Keswick Museum and Art Gallery, Keswick; Liverpool City Library, Liverpool; National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth; The Royal Institution of Great Britain; University of Sheffield Library; Somerset Record Office; Sterling Library, Senate House, University of London.

Europe

Biblioteca Pública de Évora

The editors are extremely grateful to the family of the late Robert Galloway Kirkpatrick Jnr for granting us permission to quote from his unpublished doctoral thesis ‘The Letters of Robert Southey to Mary Barker From 1800 to 1826’ (Harvard, 1967).

Acknowledgements

The Collected Letters of Robert Southey has been made possible by the generosity, help and support of a number of individuals and institutions.

The general editors thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a Resource Enhancement award. Lynda Pratt would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a Research Leave grant; the Leverhulme Trust for a Research Fellowship; the British Academy for a Small Research grant; the Beinecke Library, Yale University, for an Osborn fellowship; the Huntington Library, San Marino, for a Michael Connell fellowship; the Friends of Princeton University library for a research grant; and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, University of Texas, Austin, for a research fellowship. Tim Fulford would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust for a Research Fellowship.

The Collected Letters of Robert Southey has also benefited from grants from the Humanities Research Centre, University of Nottingham, the Humanities and Social Sciences Strategic Research Fund, University of Nottingham, the English Department, Nottingham Trent University, and the University of Lincoln.

The editorial team are indebted to the following individuals for their advice, support and assistance in completing Part One of this edition: Frances Banks, Anthony Bowen, Averill Buchanan, Maria Castanheira, David Eastwood, Parvin Fatemi, Caroline Franklin, Michael J. Franklin, Lynne Hapgood, Laura Mandell, Tilar J. Mazzeo, Souvik Mukherjee, Mike Quilligan, Dave Rettenmaier, Nicholas Roe, Diego Saglia, Bill Speck, Sam Ward, Susan J. Wolfson, David Worrall, Duncan Wu and Nahem Yousaf.

In addition to the above, the editorial team are extremely grateful to the following for advice and assistance in completing Part Two of this edition: Richard Butterwick, Michael Eberle-Sinatra, Jason Koenig, Joanna Martin, Bill Overton, Nicola Royan, Douglass H. Thomson, and Timothy D. Whelan.

About the Design

This electronic edition was TEI-encoded by Averill Buchanan under the supervision of Laura Mandell and her team at Miami University of Ohio, and with the assistance of David Rettenmaier and Mike Quilligan at the University of Maryland. Buchanan used the new Word Macros tool developed at Miami University by Holly Connor and Jerry Gannod in order to learn TEI encoding. Mandell transformed the TEI files into HTML by using modified versions of the transforms provided by the TEI. Dave Rettenmaier and Mike Qulligan designed the splash pages, banners, etc., comprising the HTML design. The HTML pages do not use frames but rather make extensive use of tables and stylesheets for layout and presentation. The site works best when viewed with Mozilla Firefox v. 3, Netscape 4.0, Internet Explorer 4.0, or higher, or a comparable browser; earlier browsers may not display everything properly.