The Collected Letters of Robert Southey: Part Two
Introduction by Ian Packer and Lynda Pratt
Part Two is dedicated to our
parents, May and John Packer, June Osborn and Colin Pratt, in loving
memory.
Part Two is the first-ever collected edition of the
surviving letters written by Southey between 1798 and 1803. The letters
published here begin with Southey writing to the
Monthly Magazine
in January 1798 about Spanish and Portuguese poetry, a subject of lifelong
interest; and end on New Year’s Eve 1803 with him anticipating a return to
Madoc, his intended transatlantic poetic magnum opus.
Part Two follows the editorial conventions described in About
this Edition and publishes newly transcribed, fully annotated texts, bringing
together in one place correspondence scattered between 37 archives in North
America and the United Kingdom. It comprises 596 letters, of which 199 are
published for the first time, and 107 are published in full for the first time.
In addition, 5 letters that appeared pseudonymously in the
Monthly
Magazine are here newly attributed to Southey.
The letters in
Part Two were sent to some 40 very
diverse individuals: including friends from childhood and school (Charles
Danvers, Grosvenor Bedford and Charles Wynn), from university (Nicholas
Lightfoot), from radical youth (Samuel Taylor Coleridge and George Dyer) and
from professional life (Joseph Cottle and Daniel Stuart). The years 1798-1803
saw the emergence of important new Southeyan relationships and correspondences,
notably with the statistician John Rickman, the translator William Taylor, the
scientist and poet Humphry Davy, and the writer Mary Barker. Whilst some of
Southey’s epistolary interactions, notably those with Bedford, Cottle and Wynn,
were to be of lifelong duration, others in this period were the product of
temporary expediency. For example, a letter sent in 1798 to the Liverpudlian man
of letters and social campaigner William Roscoe in a vain attempt to track down
the maverick, poet William Gilbert (Letter 339); and one in 1803 to the
bibliographer and antiquary Joseph Haslewood on a matter connected to Southey
and Joseph Cottle’s three-volume edition of Chatterton (Letter 694). Although
nearly 600 letters survive, letter-fragments and references within surviving
letters to ones now lost remind us of the fragile, selective nature of what has
come down to us. It is clear from this edition, that some important
correspondences now exist only in part, notably with Coleridge, George Dyer,
Stuart and Cottle.
The six years covered by
Part Two were a turbulent
and crucial time for Southey. They are also a period of his career that has been
relatively neglected, when he was neither the incendiary radical of his youth or
the combustible Tory of his middle and old age. In 1798 Southey was a restless
creature. Unsettled personally and professionally, he moved between a series of
rented houses in the South West of England and London, and was torn between the
conflicting options of a legal or a literary career. By the end of 1803 his life
was beginning to assume, outwardly at least, a more settled appearance. He had
opted decisively for a literary career and in September of that year taken up
residence at Greta Hall, Keswick. His relocation, reluctant and temporary at
first, proved permanent and additionally set him on the road to being a ‘Lake’
poet, a label Southey loathed.
The letters published here allow for a more accurate, detailed,
and nuanced mapping of Southey’s life, works and interactions with and impact
upon his contemporaries during these years than has previously been possible.
The events they encompass include his reconciliation with Coleridge in 1799; his
public and private responses to
Lyrical Ballads (1798); his
reaction to the rise of Napoleon and the continuing conflict between Britain and
revolutionary France; his second and final visit to Portugal in 1800-1801, and
the resultant hardening of his anti-Catholicism; his unhappy stint as a
secretary to the Irish Chancellor Isaac Corry in 1801-1802; his reaction to the
execution of the United Irishman Robert Emmett in 1803; and his emotional
bludgeoning by the deaths in relentless succession between 1801-1803 of three
Margarets, his cousin, mother and first child. His correspondence also records
the increasing emergence of Southey as a literary professional. Between 1798 and
1803, he wrote for the
Morning Post,
Critical
Review, and
Monthly Magazine. His major book
publications included the annotated Islamic romance
Thalaba the
Destroyer (1801), a new volume of
Poems (1799), two
volumes of the
Annual Anthology (1799 and 1800), and revised
versions of his 1797 verse collection,
Joan of Arc and
Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and
Portugal. He edited the works of his fellow Bristolian Thomas
Chatterton and translated the romance
Amadis of Gaul. In
addition, he completed a fifteen-book version of the revisionist transatlantic
epic
Madoc, produced early drafts of what became
The Curse
of Kehama, and embarked on a planned prose magnum opus, a ‘History
of Portugal’. This rather terrifying list does not include projected but
unexecuted projects such as an epic on the flood, a literary history of
Portugal, a hexametrical epic on Mohammed (to be co-written with Coleridge) and
numerous shorter poems sketched out in his correspondence and in his
Common-Place Books. The letters published in
Part
Two provide crucial new information about all these projects,
including early drafts of
Thalaba,
Madoc, gothic
ballads, revisionist ‘English Eclogues’ and numerous other shorter poems. In so
doing
Part Two supplies fresh evidence for how Southey the
‘entire man of letters’ and one of the most prolific authors of his age came
into being.
We hope that by making annotated, scholarly texts of the letters
from 1798-1803 available for the first time, this edition will contribute to a
richer, more complex, understanding of this crucial period for Southey and for
British Romanticism as a whole.