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MS untraced; text is taken from Robert Galloway Kirkpatrick Jnr, ‘The Letters of Robert Southey to Mary Barker From 1800 to 1826’ (unpublished PhD, Harvard, 1967), pp. 39-42. Previously published: John Wood Warter (ed.), Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, 4 vols (London, 1856), I, pp. 209–211.
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.
Women are subject to four diseases, the growls, the grumbles, the growels, & the gripes, all four great grievous & growing grievances. Edith is now troubled with the last, & so I thought I would tell you of it, & that Thought begot this Epistle, which is therefore the legitimate grandchild of the Gripes, & if it grumbles will take after its family.
Why have you not written? you told me a boy from Penkridge would
call for your medicine. Well – I got the physic & wrote a letter, & the
boy did not come. so I took the physic & burnt the
letter, & this comes to tell you so.
Undutifullest of all Godmothers – for Godmother you are by the
rites of the Church, to “Margaret Edith daughter of Robert & Edith Southey,” & Martha was your proxy. Your
goddaughter is very well – like my old books ugly but good, a flat-nosed,
round-foreheaded, grey-eyed girl, eyes full of good humour & limbs like
Doctor Doddhave made poems about her, sundry poems & good.
they would make an interesting volume & might be called A Fathers Effusions.
mostly short as Effusions should be, & always true to the feeling that
inspired them. Take a specimen –
There are sundry others rhyming to dirty wench, &
[suge?] daughter, & hey-diddle-diddle, which are upon subjects of too private a nature to
be given to the public.
Senhora you puzzle me by your hand-writing, a very pretty hand writing but cursedly unintelligible. a cramp-crooked-crow-quill-twelve-o-clock-at-night sort of a hand-writing. the whole six & twenty letters like twins, such a family likeness among them that there is no knowing one from another, not even by their stature, for the tall ones are so bandy-legged that their heads do not overtop the hump backs of their dwarf brethren. I make a hop-step & jump-work at reading it, skipping from the dot of an i to the cross of a t (if they happen to have them) & guessing at all between. Senhora it is a handwriting of the feminine gender – it is penwomanship Senhora!
Now – have you been ill? – or have you been so long silent
because you conceived we had taken up wing? – we are still here & still
houseless, having been disappointed both of a home at Keswick & at Glamorganshire, when we
thought every thing settled. I am hunting in this neighbourhood & so soon as
we are settled you shall know, for if you do not come visit us then by the
ContunderMallet-hitter bring, my boys/ To
consecrate our nuptial joys;/ Place that dread CONTUNDER there/ Safe in the
soft lap of my fair’); and Joseph Cottle,
I have been – alas I am crippled with sore
eyes. my poor history
Ediths love – Mrs Lovells – for myself you know I must be