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Southey’s surviving letters from 1791-1797 are written to some 25 extremely diverse individuals, some familiar from literary history, others not. They include friends from childhood (John James Morgan, Charles Danvers, Sarah and Edith Fricker); from school (Grosvenor Charles Bedford and Charles Watkin Williams Wynn); from university (John Horseman); and from professional life (John Aikin and William Owen Pughe). Some correspondents – such as Charles Collins –would rapidly disappear from Southey’s orbit; others (notably Bedford and Wynn) would remain lifelong friends. A third group, including Joseph Cottle and Robert Lovell, are reminders of the inevitable overlap in the letters between his personal and professional, private and public lives. The letters Southey sent to Cottle, who from 1795 was simultaneously his friend and his publisher, combine gossip about mutual acquaintances with literary business, returning proofing corrections, detailing financial concerns, and complaining about incompetent printers. They also provide evidence of his response to other writers, including his admiration for Bowles and Sayers and his reaction to controversial novels like Matthew Lewis’s
The correspondence on Spanish and Portuguese literature, Chatterton, the Welsh language and the treatment of English prisoners of war, sent by Southey to the
The most conspicuous absences are the letters sent by Southey to two key individuals in his early literary career:
Coleridge and Robert Lovell. Coleridge and Southey met in Oxford in summer 1794 and subsequently corresponded. Whilst several of Coleridge’s letters to Southey from 1794-1797 survive, only one from Southey to Coleridge has come down to us, and that only in the fragmentary version published by Cuthbert Southey (Letter 229.1). fallen back into the Ranks’.
You sate down and wrote – I used to saunter about and think what I should write. And we ought to appreciate our comparative Industry by the quantum of mental exertion, not the particular mode of it. By the number of Thoughts collected, not by the number of Lines, thro’ which these Thoughts are diffused.Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Robert Southey, [13] November 1795, Griggs, I, p. 172.
Coleridge constructs an image of Southey’s writing as prolix, unreflective, radically different and, by implication, inferior to his
own. His rhetoric was calculatedly one-sided, designed to suit his own agenda, to combat his own fears and demons. Yet his relationship
with Southey was a two-way exchange between equals – something that the absence of Southey’s replies makes it easy to overlook. We can
use Coleridge’s part of the correspondence to guess at what Southey had said or written, but we cannot be certain. The most detailed
picture of Southey’s views on Coleridge in the mid 1790s has to emerge, then, not from the intimacy and immediacy of their one-to-one
exchanges, but from what Southey had to say in letters to others. It is here that we can map his movement from enchantment to
disillusionment. We can follow his excitement at meeting ‘one whom I very much esteem & admire’ (Letter 94), ‘a man of the first
genius & abilities, & ... my friend’ (Letter 100). As relationships between the two soured, we can also chart Southey’s growing
disillusionment and determination to sever their connections, including creative links. We learn of his decision to ‘expunge every line
of Coleridges ... all he wrote not all he claims’ from the second edition of
one who has neither the feelings nor habits of honest independance, & who always indulges himself careless of consequences ... it is not possible to think too highly[MS torn] Coleridges abilities, or too despicably of him in every other character. (Letter 250)
His opinion was not to alter radically in the coming years.
Another less familiar, but equally central literary relationship of the 1790s can also only be glimpsed in part: that between Southey and Robert Lovell. The two Bristol-born poets met in late 1793, introduced by their mutual friends the Fricker sisters. (Lovell, like Southey and Coleridge, was to marry one of the Frickers.) Their relationship was ended by Lovell’s premature and sudden death in 1796. Only a tiny fraction of what was probably a substantial correspondence survives, consisting of one complete (Letter 85) and one fragmentary letter (Letter 147) from Southey to Lovell; none from Lovell to Southey is extant. This gap in the correspondence means that it is easy to underestimate the importance of their friendship. The letters published here – both those sent to Lovell and those written about him – allow his importance to Southey, particularly in the period 1793-4, to emerge for the first time. Letter 85, the only complete one from Southey to Lovell extant, offers a tantalising glimpse of their friendship. Lovell emerges as a sharer in Southey’s politics and literary ambition, someone with whom he could exchange political news, a recently completed radical elegy ‘To the Exiled Patriots’, a series of sonnets and information about projected works, including the earliest summary of the Welsh-American epic
... a poet in some walks I do not know his equal — in the plaintive & soft kinds — elegy & sonnet for instance but this is not his only merit — epistles & various other species he has handled with peculiar delicacy. I do not scruple to say that for elegance & simplicity of versification I know no Author in our language that surpasses him. most probably we shall soon publish together. (Letter 76)
Lovell was, to Southey, more than an example of a good, modern poet. His presence seems to have spurred on Southey’s own literary ambitions. At the time of their meeting Lovell’s career was slightly more advanced – he was author of the soon-to-be-published
Southey’s creative partnership with Lovell was short-lived but important, a precursor to his more troubled relationship with Coleridge. The arrival of Coleridge in Bristol in summer 1794 marked a turning-point, and Lovell’s position as Southey’s first-choice collaborator was gradually eroded. His increasing lack of status was demonstrated in Coleridge and Southey’s decision to exclude his one-act contribution from the topical drama
Lovell’s death in 1796 was but one of a series of losses. The years 1791-1797 were turbulent, as well as formative, for Southey. The letters published in Part One cover traumatic experiences such as his expulsion from Westminster School in 1792 and failure to gain admission to Christ Church, Oxford; the imprisonment of his father, for a friend’s debt, and his subsequent release and death; and Southey’s struggle between duty to his family, who expected him to follow a suitable profession, and his desire to be a poet. Key personal events in this period include his total estrangement from his formidable maiden aunt Elizabeth Tyler, who disapproved of Southey’s relationship with Edith Fricker; his secret marriage to Edith in November 1795; his first visit to Spain and Portugal in 1795-1796; his friendship and alienation from Coleridge; the appearance of his earliest publications (including
As the letters disclose, Southey was unsettled personally and professionally during 1791-1797. After the debacle of
Southey’s letters map his personal and domestic upheaval onto a period of political turbulence. They provide crucial new insights into his early radicalism, and responses to major contemporary events such as the executions of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and Robespierre, the outbreak and progress of the war between England and France, and the repressive regime of William Pitt. They also make available fresh information about his friendships with individuals who did not share his radical beliefs, notably the rotten-borough monger Thomas Phillipps Lamb and Southey’s well-connected patron Charles Wynn, nephew of the foreign secretary Lord Grenville. A would-be poet from his earliest youth, it is not surprising that Southey’s political views translated into verse. The letters published here provide important poetic manifestations of his radicalism. Southey’s hatred of penal laws can be seen in the earliest surviving version of the ‘Botany-Bay Eclogue’ ‘Elinor’ (Letter 127); his love of political protest in ‘The Soldier’s Wife’ and the sonnet ‘Poor Wanderer of the Night!’ (Letter 127); his hatred of tyranny in the monodrama ‘Aristodemus’ (Letter 92); his disdain for the ‘spaniel fool’ ‘Man’, who ‘crouches down & licks his tyrants hand/ And courts oppression’ in ‘To a College Cat’ (Letter 181); and his rediscovery of the political inscription in ‘For a Column at Truxillo’ (Letter 170). The letters also draw attention to new additions to the Southey canon. They highlight the radical poems he published in newspapers: including ‘a seditious ode in the ludicrous stile addressed to the Cannibals’ which appeared under the republican pseudonym ‘Caius Gracchus’ (Letter 162).
As the sonnets, eclogues, monodramas, elegies, epic fragments and hundreds of lines of political and humorous verse sent to friends suggest, the letters published here show the coming into being of a literary career marked by eclecticism and experimentation. In 1791, Southey was a schoolboy versifier and imitator on a large scale. The classical models favoured at Westminster jostle for space in his correspondence with adaptations of Pope, Gray and Shenstone. However, as he moves beyond school and university days, classical allusions and adaptations fall away, and are replaced by other models, including Bowles and Akenside, and a significant new interest in comparative, post-Renaissance and contemporary European literature. Southey’s first visit to Spain and Portugal in 1795-1796 emerges from his surviving correspondence as a turning-point. It allowed him to acquire two new languages (he became fluent in Spanish and Portuguese) and opened up to him new cultural territories. Southey’s linguistic and cultural encounter with the Iberian Peninsula was to shape the remainder of his working life. It mapped out textual lands that he was to colonise and exploit throughout his career, as poet, historian and translator. In so doing, it laid the foundations of Southey’s interest in international cultures and his participation in – and shaping of – British Romanticism as a globalised enterprise.
As well as providing important information about Southey’s developing literary preoccupations, the letters also contain significant new details on the writing and publication of
Southey’s published works were, though, to be illuminated in another way: by notes derived from his wide reading in world literatures. The letters published here shed light on his practice of annotation. They manifest in embryonic form the delight in antiquarian excavation and the collection of anecdotal information that were to be refined throughout his writing life, in particular in the notes to
a hackney coach horse turned into a field of grass falls not more eagerly to a breakfast which lasts the whole day, than I attacked thefolold folios so respectably covered with dust. I begin to like dirty rotten binding, & whenever I get among books pass by the gilt coxcombs &yetdisturb the spiders. — But you shall hear what I have got ... there are more treasures in this library — & I go there again on Monday next. (Letter 278)
His account gives a sense of the excitement he found in research and of the prodigious labours that went into the notes that adorned many of his poems.
This first part of