136- ] English Literature
Robert Southey
Robert
Southey (/ˈsaʊði/ or /ˈsʌði/; born Aug. 12, 1774, Bristol, Gloucestershire,
Eng.—died March 21, 1843, Keswick, Cumberland) was an English poet of the
Romantic school, and Poet Laureate from 1813 until his death , and writer of miscellaneous prose who is
chiefly remembered for his association with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William
Wordsworth, both of whom were leaders of the early Romantic movement.. Like the
other Lake Poets, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Southey began
as a radical but became steadily more conservative as he gained respect for
Britain and its institutions. Other romantics such as Byron accused him of
siding with the establishment for money and status. He is remembered especially
for the poem "After Blenheim" and the original version of
"Goldilocks and the Three Bears".
Life
Robert
Southey was born in Wine Street, Bristol, to Robert Southey and Margaret Hill.
He was educated at Westminster School, London (where he was expelled for
writing an article in The Flagellant, a magazine he originated, attributing the
invention of flogging to the Devil), and at Balliol College, Oxford.
Southey
went to Oxford with "a heart full of poetry and feeling, a head full of
Rousseau and Werther, and my religious principles shaken by Gibbon". He
later said of Oxford, "All I learnt was a little swimming... and a little
boating". He did, however, write a play, Wat Tyler (which, in 1817, after
he became Poet Laureate, was published, to embarrass him, by his enemies).
Experimenting with a writing partnership with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, most
notably in their joint composition of The Fall of Robespierre, Southey
published his first collection of poems in 1794. The same year, Southey,
Coleridge, Robert Lovell and several others discussed creating an idealistic
community ("pantisocracy") on the banks of the Susquehanna River in
America.
In
1795 he married Edith Fricker, whose sister Sara married Coleridge. The same
year, he travelled to Portugal, and wrote Joan of Arc, published in 1796. He
then wrote many ballads, went to Spain in 1800, and on his return settled in
the Lake District.
In
1799, Southey and Coleridge were involved with early experiments with nitrous
oxide (laughing gas), conducted by the Cornish scientist Humphry Davy.
While
writing prodigiously, he received a government pension in 1807, and in 1809
started a long association with the Quarterly Review, which provided almost his
only income for most of his life. He was appointed laureate in 1813, a post he
came greatly to dislike. In 1821, Southey wrote A Vision of Judgment, to
commemorate George III, in the preface to which he attacked Byron who, as well
as responding with a parody, The Vision of Judgment (see below), mocked him
frequently in Don Juan.
In
1837, Edith died, and Southey remarried, to Caroline Anne Bowles, also a poet,
on 4 June 1839. The marriage broke down, not least because of his increasing
dementia. His mind was giving way when he wrote a last letter to his friend
Walter Savage Landor in 1839, but he continued to mention Landor's name when
generally incapable of mentioning anyone. He died on 21 March 1843 and was
buried in the churchyard of Crosthwaite Church, Keswick, where he had
worshipped for forty years. There is a memorial to him inside the church, with
an epitaph written by his friend, William Wordsworth.
Southey
was also a prolific letter writer, literary scholar, essay writer, historian
and biographer. His biographies include the life and works of John Bunyan, John
Wesley, William Cowper, Oliver Cromwell and Horatio Nelson. The last has rarely
been out of print since its publication in 1813 and was adapted as the 1926
British film Nelson.
He
was a generous man, particularly kind to Coleridge's abandoned family, but he
incurred the enmity of many, including Hazlitt as well as Byron, who felt he
had betrayed his principles in accepting pensions and the laureateship, and in
retracting his youthful ideals.
Politics
Although
originally a radical supporter of the French Revolution, Southey followed the
trajectory of his fellow Romantic poets Wordsworth and Coleridge towards
conservatism. Embraced by the Tory establishment as Poet Laureate, and from
1807 in receipt of a yearly stipend from them, he vigorously supported the
Liverpool government. He argued against parliamentary reform ("the
railroad to ruin with the Devil for driver"), blamed the Peterloo Massacre
on an allegedly revolutionary "rabble" killed and injured by
government troops, and spurned Catholic emancipation.[9] In 1817 he privately
proposed penal transportation for those guilty of "libel" or
"sedition". He had in mind figures like Thomas Jonathan Wooler and
William Hone, whose prosecution he urged. Such writers were guilty, he wrote in
the Quarterly Review, of "inflaming the turbulent temper of the manufacturer
and disturbing the quiet attachment of the peasant to those institutions under
which he and his fathers have dwelt in peace." Wooler and Hone were
acquitted, but the threats caused another target, William Cobbett, to emigrate
temporarily to the United States.
In
some respects, Southey was ahead of his time in his views on social reform. For
example, he was an early critic of the evils the new factory system brought to
early 19th-century Britain. He was appalled by the living conditions in towns
like Birmingham and Manchester and especially by employment of children in
factories and outspoken about them. He sympathised with the pioneering
socialist plans of Robert Owen, advocated that the state promotes public works
to maintain high employment, and called for universal education.
Given
his departure from radicalism, and his attempts to have former fellow
travellers prosecuted, it is unsurprising that less successful contemporaries
who kept the faith attacked Southey. They saw him as selling out for money and
respectability.
In
1817, Southey was confronted with the surreptitious publication of a radical
play, Wat Tyler, which he had written in 1794 at the height of his radical
period. This was instigated by his enemies in an attempt to embarrass the Poet
Laureate and highlight his apostasy from radical poet to supporter of the Tory
establishment. One of his most savage critics was William Hazlitt. In his
portrait of Southey, in The Spirit of the Age, he wrote: "He wooed Liberty
as a youthful lover, but it was perhaps more as a mistress than a bride; and he
has since wedded with an elderly and not very reputable lady, called
Legitimacy." Southey largely ignored his critics but was forced to defend
himself when William Smith, a member of Parliament, rose in the House of
Commons on 14 March to attack him.[11] In a spirited response Southey wrote an
open letter to the MP, in which he explained that he had always aimed at
lessening human misery and bettering the condition of all the lower classes and
that he had only changed in respect of "the means by which that
amelioration was to be effected." As he put it, "that as he learnt to
understand the institutions of his country, he learnt to appreciate them
rightly, to love, and to revere, and to defend them."
Another
critic of Southey in his later period was Thomas Love Peacock, who scorned him
in the character of Mr. Feathernest in his 1817 satirical novel Melincourt.
He
was often mocked for what were seen as sycophantic odes to the king, notably in
Byron's long ironic dedication of Don Juan to Southey. In the poem Southey is
dismissed as insolent, narrow and shabby. This was based both on Byron's lack
of respect for Southey's literary talent, and his disdain for what he perceived
as Southey's hypocritical turn to conservatism later in life. Much of the
animosity between the two men can be traced back to Byron's belief that Southey
had spread rumours about him and Percy Bysshe Shelley being in a "League
of Incest" during their time on Lake Geneva in 1816, an accusation that
Southey strenuously denied.
In
response, Southey attacked what he called the Satanic School among modern poets
in the preface to his poem, A Vision of Judgement, written after the death of
George III. While not naming Byron, it was clearly directed at him. Byron
retaliated with The Vision of Judgment, a parody of Southey's poem.
Without
his prior knowledge, the Earl of Radnor, an admirer of his work, had Southey
returned as MP for the latter's pocket borough seat of Downton in Wiltshire at
the 1826 general election, as an opponent of Catholic emancipation, but Southey
refused to sit, causing a by-election in December that year, pleading that he
did not have a large enough estate to support him through political life, or
want to take on the hours full attendance required. He wished to continue
living in the Lake District and preferred to defend the Church of England in
writing rather than speech. He declared that "for me to change my scheme
of life and go into Parliament, would be to commit a moral and intellectual
suicide." His friend John Rickman, a Commons clerk, noted that
"prudential reasons would forbid his appearing in London" as a
Member.
In
1835, Southey declined the offer of a baronetcy, but accepted a life pension of
£300 a year from Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel.
Poetical
Career
Unlike
most of the English Romantics, who wrote predominantly either in verse or in
prose, Robert Southey—like his friend and brother-in-law Samuel Taylor
Coleridge and, to some extent, Sir Walter Scott—was both poet and prose writer
and one as fully as the other. Of his fellow Romantics he was perhaps the most
versatile, as well as one of the most prolific. As poet—and eventually poet
laureate—he produced epics, romances, and metrical tales, ballads, plays,
monodramas, odes, eclogues, sonnets, and miscellaneous lyrics. His prose works
include histories, biographies, essays, reviews, translations, travelogues,
semi-fictional journalism, polemical dialogues, and a farraginous work of
fiction, autobiography, anecdote, and omnium-gatherum that defies
classification. His bent was inherently encyclopedic; and, while his writings
lack both moral profundity (as distinct from moral fervor) and “natural magic,”
they compensate by their vigor and abundance for their dearth of genius.
Coleridge rightly called him the complete man of letters.
By
common consent, however, Southey’s prose is superior to his verse and has
proved more durable. His ambitious epic projects were largely dead ends of a
moribund tradition. His prose works, on the contrary, did for English prose
what William Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798) did for verse:
they opposed to the orotund solemnity of the Johnsonian style a new model of
republican plainness, perspicuity, and respect for empirical facts. At its
worst such a style can be pedestrian and nondescript; at its best it is
precise, vigorous, down-to-earth, seemingly effortless, and disarmingly
unpretentious. The Sermo Pedestris, often the bane of Southey’s poetry, is the
chief virtue of his prose and one that can still engage the reader in what
might otherwise appear a mere mass of exploded ideas and superseded learning.
Although
Southey began to write journalism early and continued to compose verse in later
years, his literary career, like those of Coleridge and Scott, is roughly
divisible into two phases: an early poetic vein, followed by a midlife shift to
prose discourse. His early life is thus bound up mainly with his development as
a poet.
Robert
Southey was born in Bristol on August 12, 1774 as the oldest surviving son of a
feckless and finally bankrupt tradesman of the same name and his wife, Margaret
Hill Southey. During much of his childhood he was forced to live away from
home, under the stifling and unaffectionate tutelage of an eccentric and
domineering aunt, Elizabeth Tyler, at fashionable Bath and at boarding schools
with their dreary curricula, lack of nurture, and petty tyranny. From these
early experiences Southey developed his lifelong habit of suppressing his
intense emotions under a reserved exterior of steely cheerfulness and somewhat
frosty amiability and of taking refuge from a bleak and loveless existence in
the world of literature. He read William Shakespeare and Francis Beaumont and
John Fletcher as soon as he could read and the Renaissance epics of Torquato
Tasso, Ludovico Ariosto, John Milton, Luiz de Camões, and especially Edmund
Spenser soon thereafter. In his adolescence he read Voltaire, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Edward Gibbon, Thomas Paine, William Godwin, and other spokesmen for
Enlightenment and human emancipation. Moreover, he early tried his hand at
writing plays, epics, and incidental verse. While at Westminster public school
in London (1788–1792), he offended the school authorities by publishing a
“contumacious” satire against corporal punishment—his first prose effort—in the
school newspaper and was summarily expelled. The expulsion, along with the
bankruptcy and death (possibly by suicide) of his father, produced an emotional
crisis, which he sought to overcome by reading Epictetus: the Stoic philosopher
remained his vade mecum ever after.
Early
in 1793 Southey entered Balliol College at Oxford University to study for holy
orders in compliance with the wishes of his maternal uncle, the Reverend
Herbert Hill. But he was by now, like many young intellectuals of his time, a
fervent republican, deist, and sympathizer with the French Revolution. At odds
with Church dogma and the Establishment, incensed by the soulless pedantry and
regimentation of the masters and by the snobbery and licentiousness of the
scholars, he left the university after only two terms. During this period of
ferment and uncertainty, he made two momentous acquaintances. One was a young
seamstress, Edith Fricker, whom he met in the fall of 1793 and married two
years later (November 14, 1795): she proved to be a devoted wife and mother of
his children for more than 40 years, until her mind failed and she died in
1837. The other was Coleridge, then of Cambridge, two years Southey’s senior
and, like him, a budding poet and enthusiastic republican and revolutionary
fellow traveler. When the two met in June 1794 an intense friendship developed
rapidly, and the two young radicals, in concert with some of their respective
college friends, concocted a plan to establish, in the Susquehanna Valley, an
egalitarian community, a “Pantisocracy” (meaning “equal rule of all”) based on
communal property and the fusion of physical and intellectual labor. The scheme
eventually failed for lack of sufficient funds and because ideological and
personal rifts developed between the idealistic but dilatory Coleridge and his
more practical revisionist friend and housemate. When Southey decided to
abandon the cause by accepting an invitation to Portugal from his uncle
Hill—and a stipend from his school friend Charles Wynn enabling him to switch
from divinity to the study of law—Coleridge, who had been persuaded, for the
good of Pantisocracy, to become engaged and married to Edith Fricker’s sister
Sarah, felt trapped and betrayed. For the moment the friendship was over.
Southey’s
five-month sojourn on the Iberian Penninsula during the first half of 1796
resulted in his first published prose work, Letters Written During a Short
Residence in Spain and Portugal (1797). By then he had already published, with
his friend and fellow Pantisocrat Robert Lovell, a volume of Poems
(1795)—reflective pieces, “odes, elegies, sonnets, etc.,” in the manner of
18th-century sensibility—and had acquired a reputation as the author of an epic
with revolutionary overtones, Joan of Arc (1796; revised, 1798); he had also
written two plays, including a piece of hackwork with Coleridge, The Fall of
Robespierre (1794), and the notorious Wat Tyler (which remained in manuscript
until 1817, when it was unearthed and published surreptitiously by political
enemies to compromise the “renegade” laureate with a Jacobinical skeleton in
his closet). The Letters are hardly literature in the sense in which the later
Letters from England are, but they are an early example of Southey’s knack for
turning chance occasions to journalistic account. Together with Edith, Southey
returned to the Peninsula in 1800–1801 for a second, more extended visit (his
Portuguese Journal from that year was unearthed and published by Adolfo Cabral in
1960). The two sojourns turned him into a lifelong student of Spanish and
Portuguese history and ethnography.
Upon
his return to England—and to Edith—in summer 1796, Southey and his wife spent
several years in a state of virtual transiency, partly in London, where he
desultorily read for the law at Gray’s Inn as stipulated by Wynn’s annuity, and
then at various localities in the south of England after it became clear to him
that the law was not for him. There followed the second, year-long stay in
Portugal and then eight more months in London and Dublin in an abortive attempt
at a civil-service career as private secretary to Isaac Corry, the Irish
chancellor of the Exchequer. During these years, Southey produced a large
amount of lyrical verse—odes, sonnets, inscriptions, emblematic poems,
monodramas, ecologues, and especially ballads dealing with social injustice,
crime, guilt, and the supernatural and demonic. He also wrote the first of a
planned series of mythological romances, Thalaba the Destroyer (1801),
illustrating the religion of Islam through the exotic story of a pious young
Moslem champion’s struggle against a college of malignant sorcerers.
The
decisive turning point in Southey’s biography occurred in September of 1803,
when the successive shocks of the deaths of his mother, a beloved cousin, and
his first, infant daughter prompted the Southeys to visit Coleridge at his new
domicile, Greta Hall, in Keswick in the English Lake District. The visit turned
into a lifelong stay. Coleridge, who had repeatedly urged his brother-in-law
and ci-devant fellow Pantisocrat to come live with, or at least visit, him in
Keswick, ironically promptly departed in search of health and then separated
from his wife and family, leaving Southey in charge as chief provider at Greta
Hall, a post the scrupulous Southey dutifully kept until his death 40 years
later. Except for periodic travel abroad (in Scotland, in the Netherlands, in
France), visits, and business trips (such as his trip to Oxford to obtain an
honorary LL.D. in 1820), Southey never left the Lake District again.
In
1803 he still thought of himself primarily as a poet and continued to do so for
another decade or so. During the first years at Keswick, he gave final shape to
a project that had occupied him intermittently since his Westminster days, his
second, two-part epic, Madoc (1805)—“Madoc in Wales” and “Madoc at
Aztlan”—about the legendary 12th-century Welsh prince who supposedly discovered
the New World and settled in Aztec country, fighting wars against barbarism,
superstition, and priestcraft and establishing a bridgehead for a humane,
Christian civilization—Southey’s epic of foundation and of Pantisocracy
rewritten in essentially imperialist terms. In 1809 Southey completed another
mythological romance, The Curse of Kehama (1810), this time on Hinduism, an
extravagant story of a pariah of humble and patient merit and his persecution
by, divinely assisted struggle against, and eventual victory over, a would-be
cosmocrat who at last overreaches himself—a story clearly intended to allude to
the struggle against Napoleon and one that later served as a model for Percy
Bysshe Shelley’s greater fable of nonviolent resistance against overwhelming
odds, Prometheus Unbound (1820). A third and final epic, Roderick, the Last of
the Goths, appeared in 1814, the year after Southey’s appointment to the
laureateship; it narrates the fall of the Visigothic kingdom to the Moors in
711 A.D. and the beginning of the Spanish reconquista and the Asturian
monarchy. This poem, Southey’s greatest epic success at the time, is even more
pointedly directed at the Napoleonic Wars and the Peninsular War in particular.
Now, however, the ruling sentiment is one of ferocious vindictiveness and
religious bigotry that stands in striking contrast to the antiwar theme of Joan
of Arc and even to the reluctant militancy of Madoc and to the doctrine of
redemption through the patient suffering of Kehama.
The
arc from the pacifism of Joan of Arc to the crusading spirit and unvarnished
jingoism of Roderick and the laureate and anti-Bonapartist verses of those
years (such as Carmen Triumphale, 1814, and The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo,
1816) circumscribes most of Southey’s career as a poet, though there were some
later efforts, such as the lugubrious Tale of Paraguay (1825), about a family
of South American mission Indians, or the unfortunate Vision of Judgement
(1821) in hexameters, about George III’s ascent to Southey’s now throughly Tory
heaven, not to mention later laureate odes and occasional ballads and metrical
tales. During the last 30 years of his life, Southey’s principal literary
pursuit was that of a scholar and essayist. The story of that pursuit, more
clearly than that of the poet, records the emergence of a conservative out of
the fervid republican of the early years.
Southey’s
early prose venture, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and
Portugal, uses the flexible and currently popular medium of epistolary
journalism to combine travelogue, description, and anecdote with essays,
translations, and original poems and to pepper picturesque and often vivid
scenic prospects and local color with republican sarcasms about “the double
despotism of Church and State”—about monasticism, Catholic superstitions and
“miracle-mongering,” and the spectacle of royal extravagance and oppression in
the midst of endemic poverty, ignorance, licentiousness, and disease. Southey
has an eye for curious, bizarre, or telling details, customs, and costumes, and
for scenic settings and humorous incidents. Letters Written During a Short
Residence in Spain and Portugal is an early example of Southey’s tenacious hold
on facts as well as of his tendency to tar all things with the same brush. The
volume proved popular, and a second edition, somewhat less spontaneous, more
cautious and controlled, appeared in 1799. The Portuguese Journal of 1800–1801
is even more vivid, and is less glibly judgmental, though here too Southey
indulges an antiseptic obsession with “superstition,” and with filth, stench,
and vermin, along with his love of the Iberian landscape.
After
his first return from abroad, Southey embarked upon his career as a
professional reviewer, first with notices of Spanish and Portuguese literature
for the Monthly Magazine and then, in 1798, with reviews for the Critical
Review, for which he wrote, among other things, a glowing account of Walter
Savage Landor‘s oriental poem Gebir (September 1799) and the rather
unsympathetic critique of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (October
1798) with its notorious dismissal of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner as a
“Dutch attempt at German sublimity.” In 1802 Southey also became a regular
contributor to the newly founded Annual Review, for which he reviewed some 150
titles during the next six years, most of them ephemeral.
Like
his travelogues, his reviews are essentially journalistic: largely synoptic and
digestive, proceeding by summary paraphrase and direct quotation, and based in
their judgment on common sense and personal taste rather than on theoretical
principles like those informing Coleridge’s criticism. Even so, Southey’s
reviews are of historical importance insofar as, at a time when reviewers still
wrote anonymously and therefore could “tomahawk” with impunity, they helped to
usher in a more considerate and sympathetic approach to what Southey himself
termed the “ungentle craft.” Literary jobbing of this sort was a fairly
lucrative employment in that age of rapidly expanding book markets and remained
throughout Southey’s life a principal source of this income. Although largely
hackwork, these reviews also laid the foundation for his later Quarterly essays
and even an achievement such as The Life of Nelson (1813).
During
these years Southey also established himself as a translator and textual
editor. Between 1803 and 1808, he published prose adaptations of the three
leading romances of chivalry of Iberian provenance, Amadis of Gaul, from a
16th-century Spanish version, Palmerin of England, essentially a modernization
of Anthony Munday’s 17th-century Englishing of a French variant of the romance,
and Chronicle of the Cid, a translation of the early-16th-century Cronica del
Cid, supplemented by material derived from the earlier Poema del Cid and
various popular ballads. Southey has the distinction of being the first to
argue for the Portuguese origin of Palmerin of England—his claim of a like
origin of Amadis of Gaul was based on a confusion of names and is no longer
accepted. As renditions they are of limited value. Amadis of Gaul in particular
is bowdlerized, purged of most of its amorous content in the name of a narrow
moral and stylistic decorum that appealed to the taste of the time—the work
sold well—but is obsolete today. More durable has been the third of these
translations, Chronicle of the Cid, whose martial spirit unsullied by carnality
was more congenial to Southey and enabled him to produce a comprehensive
narrative of Spain’s national hero in a homogeneous, slightly archaic,
paratactic style modeled on Sir Thomas Malory and the Bible.
In
his travelogues, reviews, and translations, Southey served as a kind of
middleman of literature intent on advertising, condensing, packaging, and
importing literary goods, new and old, for readier consumption. This spirit of
literary merchandising is embodied also in Southey’s various textual editions
of these years, including the three-volume collections of the writings of his
unhappy fellow Bristowans Thomas Chatterton (1803; coedited with Joseph Cottle)
and Henry Kirke White (1807). The latter includes a biographical introduction
of small critical value, and both were essentially charitable undertakings to
aid the families and the memory of these inheritors of unfulfilled renown.
Specimens of the Later English Poets (1807), a massive compilation of
18th-century verse, most of it quite negligible, similarly reveals Southey’s
literary scholarship to be more antiquarian than critical and his criteria to
be moral and didactic rather than aesthetic and intellectual. Of his various
later editorial works, perhaps only the late Works of William Cowper
(1835–1837), also prefixed with a “Life,” retains a firm place in the history
of textual scholarship.
While
much of the prose Southey produced during the years 1803–1808 is either
ephemeral or an endeavor to rescue the transient from oblivion by means of
editing, translation, or synopsis, one work, Letters from England (1807),
transcends the bulk by turning journalism into fiction and thus into art.
Modeled on Montesquieu’s Letters persanes (1721) and Oliver Goldsmith’s Citizen
of the World (1760–1761), Letters from England: By Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella
uses the form of the pseudonymous epistle to combine travelogue, satire, and
personal essay into a fictional variant of the sort of epistolary journalism
found already in Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and
Portugal. Planned as early as 1803 as an “omnium gatherum” of “all that I know
and much of what I think” about his place and time, its uses and abuses,
Letters from England mingles social and political commentary and economic and
cultural analysis with anecdote and descriptions of landscapes and townscapes
to convey a cross section of English life and “manners,” fashions and foibles,
while employing the travel motif to impose a semblance of unity upon farraginous
variety. Moreover, the device of a narrative persona, chosen partly to throw
hostile critics off the scent, creates a beneficial stretch of aesthetic
distance between the author and his material. By making his mouthpiece not only
a foreigner but a Spaniard and Catholic, Southey achieves the triple effect of
modifying his personal bias through narrative perspective while playing his
anti-Catholicism off against his critique of British society, particularly his
nascent conservatism in politics and economics and his lifelong deistical
contempt for sectarian fanaticism and all manner of “pseudodoxia epidemica.”
The
fictional method is not without flaws. Scenic descriptions are at times merely
topographical inventories, even in the often vividly perspectival account of
the Lake District, and the narrative voice tends to become Southey’s own
whenever he advances from relatively trivial matters to issues that engage his
emotions. Analogously, Southey’s social-economic criticism blends shrewdness
with nostalgia and erects progressive proposals on obsolescent principles. He
inveighs against William Pitt’s repressive and reactionary policies in the name
of liberty and equality and against the exploitation and social neglect
produced by an unchecked industrialization in terms of an extreme
anti-materialism. He calls for legal, parliamentary, and military reform, as
well as for government regulation of industry and commerce. Yet his premises
are moralistic and agrarian and are inspired as much by fear of revolution as
by a desire for improvement. Even so, Letters from England is of lasting
interest as a sweeping, kaleidoscopic, and often humorous depiction of England
at the epochal beginning of the 19th century—the narrative is set in 1802,
during the Peace of Amiens—and as an early and articulate appeal to the social
conscience in the face of revolutionary change, particularly in the eloquent
evocation of the inhuman plight of the new industrial laboring class in factory
towns such as Manchester. The book was popular and sold well—at least until the
identity of the book’s author became known.
Letters
from England may be usefully juxtaposed with a second, much later piece of
fictionalized polemic, the notorious Sir Thomas More: or, Colloquies on the
Progress and Prospects of Society, written between 1820 and 1829 and published
in 1829, with a second edition in 1831. As the title indicates, the epistolary
model has here been replaced by the dialogue, Southey choosing as his new
literary model the Consolation of Boethius. But one of the fictional
interlocutors is again a Catholic, albeit this time a historical one, while the
other, Montesinos (perhaps with an allusion to Miguel de Cervantes’s Don
Quixote, 1605), represents Southey himself, the setting of the dialogues being in
fact Southey’s library at Greta Hall in the “mountainous” Lake Country. As
Renaissance man and arch-utopian, More provides a dramatic perspective on
Southey’s own time of epochal change and his early utopianism, while at the
same time serving as a kind of spiritual father figure, on whom Southey can
foist his most alarmist and apocalyptic views so as to retain for his alter ego
Montesinos a modicum of youthful optimism and belief in progress and political
justice. At other times, however, the two disputants seem to be interchangeable
in their outlook, as they bandy sermons and citations, making the colloquy less
a sustained dramatic “imaginary conversation” à la Landor (who professed to
have derived the concept from Southey) than a mere expository mechanism—an
altercation between A and B, as Charles Lamb remarked. More’s historical
Catholicism, in fact, gets in the way—Southey turns him into an embryonic
Protestant—and the fiction of a visitation by and dialogue with a ghost becomes
bizarre after the first encounter and irritating after the second or third. The
work has often been praised for its limpid prose style. But that style is
generally at its best in the numerous descriptive and anecdotal
digressions—about local scenery, local legends, or Southey’s library
holdings—interspersed with the more portentous dialogues, rather than in the
dialogues themselves.
Ideologically,
Sir Thomas More epitomizes the conservatism of Southey’s later years—an outlook
increasingly authoritarian, paternalistic, moralistic, and imperialistic.
Southey’s shift to the right dates roughly from, and was in response to, the
years 1808–1813, the period of the critical phase in Britain’s struggle against
Napoleon (the Peninsular War), of the Luddite Riots (1811) and the assassination
of prime minister Spencer Perceval (1812), and of Southey’s own engagement in
1809 as a reviewer for the conservative Quarterly Review and subsequent
appointment as poet laureate (1813). The shift is evident in the Quarterly
Review essays’ long and often formless disquisitions, a selection of which
reappeared, revised and condensed, as Essays, Moral and Political in 1832, on
the eve of the first Reform Bill. In them Southey inveighs in often shrill
tones against the evils of the day as he saw them: materialism (whether
philosophical or commercial), immorality, infidelity, and sedition, pacifism,
Methodism, Malthusianism, Catholic emancipation, and parliamentary reform. Some
of his diagnoses are accurate enough and his proposed remedies salutary:
universal education, legislation to regulate industry and provide social
benefits, and the like. But his analyses of the causes of economic and social
dislocation—and therefore also his solutions—are generally one part science and
two parts moralism. His reply to the Malthusian specter of overpopulation is
biblical authority, on the one hand, and a naively arrogant colonialism and
imperialism, on the other: God wants England to be fruitful and multiply so as
to replenish the earth and subdue it as the “hive of nations.” The purpose of
education is indoctrination rather than emancipation, and the guarantee of
social well-being is an aristocratic and ecclesiastic Establishment rather than
any utilitarian calculus determined through democratic processes.
Sir
Thomas More caps this evolving paternalistic vision of contemporary history as
an Armageddon between the forces of law and order and moral and religious
absolutes and the forces of materialism and anarchy, between the principles of
obedience and authority and the dissolving agents of pluralism and skepsis. On
a less apocalyptic level, Southey continues his critique of the “manufacturing
system”—the “dorsal spine” of Sir Thomas More, as Jean Raimond put it. If
Southey’s analysis of the evils under an unregulated laissez-faire
capitalism—concentration of wealth, consequent wage slavery, exploitation,
Gradgrind mechanization, alienation deracination, and overall dehumanization—is
ahead of its time, his nostalgia for medieval feudalism and theocracy as
guarantors of order, security, and social harmony is merely romantic and
retrogressive bad faith—as Thomas Macaulay drove home in his famous review
(Edinburgh Review, January 1830). Even so, Southey was also able to contemplate
the socialism of Robert Owen as an alternative model—over the objections of his
ghostly interlocutor to Owen’s freethinking: the device of the colloquy
generated at least a saving touch of dialectic.
For
all the volume of Southey’s journalism and polemical writing, his chief
aspiration as a prosateur—not surprisingly considering his predilection as a
poet for the epic—was to be a historian. His most ambitious, and nearly
lifelong, project was to the great “History of Portugal,” a work that was to be
both epic and encyclopedic in scope, combining fullness and variety of
narrative and description with unity of idea and design, and that would do for
the Portuguese empire what Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(1776–1788) had done for Rome. The main opus was to have been accompanied by
subsidiary volumes on the Portuguese colonies in Asia and South America, on
monasticism, on the Jesuit missions, and on Iberian literature. As was to be
expected, even in a writer of Southey’s fanatical industry and punctuality, the
work was never completed, and what must have been a voluminous manuscript
disappeared mysteriously after his death. The abortiveness of Southey’s most
cherished project dramatizes his tragic flaw as a historian—indeed as a writer:
his inability to select and to synthesize, to make the part stand
synecdochically or metonymically for the whole. His strength lies in his skill
in assembling a maximum of information into a manageable space, distilling, as
he himself put it, “wine into alcohol.”
The
proof of that alcohol can be gauged from the only major portion of the complete
Portuguese scheme that did reach publication, the massive History of Brazil.
Prompted by Britain’s new economic and political interest in Brazil consequent
upon the move of the Portuguese court to Rio de Janeiro in 1807, the History
was published in three increasingly bulky volumes between 1810 and 1819.
Southey soon came to disparage it in private, but he also hoped it would make
him the “Herodotus of South America,” and he doggedly pursued it—all 2,300-odd
pages of it—to the end. The first accurate and comprehensive Brazilian history
ever written, it was based largely on an extensive collection of printed
accounts and original documents brought from Portugal by Southey’s uncle Hill
and is still authoritative today—it has been translated a second time into
Portuguese—and is interesting especially for Southey’s championship of the
Jesuit missionaries, perhaps the single most prominent theme in the work. The
writings are undeviatingly chronological in their breathless accumulation of
historical details—from the discovery of the territory in 1500, through the
period of the explorers and adventurers, the changing fortunes of the Jesuit
missions, the rivalry between the Portuguese and the Dutch settlers, the
18th-century reforms and final expulsion of the Jesuits under the Marquês de
Pombal, all the way to the arrival of the Portuguese court in 1808. The text
also dwells at length on the exotic appeal of local color, “manners,” native
customs (often lurid), reports about Amazons, and the savagery and cannibalism
of the Indians, as well as their suffering from slavery and persecution. An
inexhaustible source of information, the History of Brazil will produce fatigue
or overload in the most determined reader. For Southeyan historical narrative
at its best, that reader will do better to turn to a separately published
subsidiary episode, The Expedition of Orsua; and the Crimes of Aguirre (1821;
originally published in the Edinburgh Annual Register for 1810 [1812]), a
concise and engrossing narrative of an episode in the history of the search for
El Dorado that explodes into mutiny, rebellion, and paranoid internecine terror
and that, in its study of the corrupting effect of personal power in an exotic
setting devoid of “Law and Order,” was meant as an analogue of the French
Revolution and in some ways anticipates Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
(1902).
There
is little to recommend Southey’s later historical works. The voluminous History
of the Peninsular War (1823–1832), while containing dense and graphic episodes,
such as the moving Siege of Saragossa, is crammed with Verbatim documents and
with digressions into local color and Iberiana that are often not even
marginally relevant to the main subject. It is, moreover, vitiated as authoritative
historiography by Southey’s contemptuous disregard of the campaign accounts of
Napoleon’s Marshal Nicolas Jean de Dieu Soult and by Arthur Wellesley, Duke of
Wellington’s refusal to open his archives to Southey. It also suffers from
over-idealization of the Spanish insurgents and a corresponding underestimation
of the role of the British in the war, that of General John Moore in
particular. It was thus speedily eclipsed by the authorized history published
concurrently by Colonel William Napier, who used all the available sources and
had himself taken part in the campaign. Prejudice, partiality, and lack of
synthesis also disfigure Southey’s history of religion in England, the popular
Book of the Church (1824), whose pervasive hostility toward Catholicism and
Catholic emancipation perverts historiography to polemic—see also the Vindiciæ
Ecclesiæ Anglicanæ (1826), Southey’s rebuttal in the controversy that ensued.
As
Southey’s poetry, however fanciful, is essentially prosaic, so his prose,
however factual, is inherently narrative and anecdotal rather than expository
and analytical. It is thus in the genre of biography—one he himself deemed “the
most useful of literary genres”—rather than in historiography proper that
Southey’s historical ambitions achieve their most lasting success. To be sure,
prolixity and partiality are hazards in the biographies as well. The late Lives
of the British Admirals (1833–1840), Southey’s endeavour to write a naval
history in biographical form, has been called the finest portrait gallery of
Elizabethan naval heroes in existence and is notable for its pioneering use of
Spanish and Portuguese sources. But the material adduced from these sources is
often of doubtful relevance, and the volumes savor of task work and encyclopedia
compilation. Similarly The Life of Wesley (1820) snowballs in Southey’s hands
into a massive chronicle of the Methodist movement, its antecedents,
development, and architects—a movement to which Southey was not sympathetic and
which he was not really competent to examine theologically. The story and
portrait of John Wesley himself, to the extent to which it is not discolored by
bias or obscured by insufficiently subordinated contexts, is faithful,
vigorous, and admirable, and remains the most popular life of the founder of
Methodism, although Southey lacks the empathy and the psychological acumen to
do full justice, beyond praise and blame, to the complexity of a mind like
Wesley’s. He fares better with a congenial subject such as William Cowper,
albeit here, too, circumstantiality, contingency, and digression are often the
bane of portraiture.
It
is the rare coincidence of moral affinity and material restraint that accounts
for the lasting popularity of Southey’s first and finest biography, The Life of
Nelson (1813). Essentially an expansion and elaboration of Southey’s February
1809 review in the Quarterly of the “official” biography of Admiral Horatio
Nelson by James Stanier Clarke and John M’Arthur (1806), Southey’s Life of
Nelson has in fact the synoptic character typical of contemporary reviewing and
can be called a literary epitome of the earlier work, though it makes use of
some additional sources. Southey’s narrative is brisk, vivid, and for once
almost undeviating. It has remained the classic portrayal of England’s greatest
naval hero.
Southey’s
account of Nelson is not one of mere hagiography. He sharply criticizes
Nelson’s obsequiousness to the repressive and degenerate court of Naples,
especially in the bloody suppression of Admiral Francesco Carraciolo’s
rebellion, and of course, he condemns Nelson’s adulterous relationship with
Emma, Lady Hamilton, on whose “spell” he in fact blames all of Nelson’s
Neapolitan errors. On the other hand, however, he views Nelson’s “infatuated
attachment,” as he primly calls it, as a fortuitous aberration and makes no
attempt to comprehend Nelson’s passion for Lady Hamilton and consequent
separation from Lady Nelson—or, for that matter, his unimpaired friendship with
Emma’s husband, Sir William Hamilton. Though a full account of this side of
Nelson’s life was neither possible nor perhaps appropriate in an official
biography, Southey’s reticence on the matter strikes the modern reader as
prudish and evasive.
Apart
from his breach of domestic decorum and related indiscretions, however, Nelson
was so thoroughly simpatico to Southey as to leave no need for a deeper, more
dialectical empathy. His tactical genius and spectacular successes were the
wonder of all, and his personal traits of kindliness mixed with pugnacity, humanity
with combativeness, boyishness with devotion to duty, self-righteous contumacy
with fanatical patriotism and royalism were so much Southey’s own as to
facilitate an apotheosis only less monumental than the one at London’s
Trafalgar Square. The Life of Nelson is in fact as much a prose epic, a kind of
Britannia Liberata, as it is a work of historiography, and it remains Southey’s
one indubitable contribution to the English literary canon.
The
year of the publication of The Life of Nelson was significantly the year of
Southey’s appointment as poet laureate, a title he kept until his death 30
years later. It was also the year in which Southey first conceived and began
the odd farrago of narrative, anecdote, essay, reverie, humor, satire, plain
nonsense, topography, “manners,” genre painting, and “commonplace” entries
called The Doctor, &c., of which he finally published the first two volumes
in 1834—again anonymously—and to which he was still adding when his mind began
to fail four years later. Prompted by a jocose yarn Coleridge, and then Southey
himself, used to spin about “Dr. Daniel Dove of Doncaster and his horse Nobs,”
whose “humour lay in making it as long-winded as possible” and each time
telling it differently, The Doctor, &c. was modeled in part on François
Rabelais and on Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–1767), in part on
Montaigne, Richard Burton, and Thomas Browne, and was designed as an amphibious
vehicle that would enable Southey to amuse and “play the fool,” sound off on a
variety of a social, economic, and religious topics, and open a kind of old
curiosity shop or intellectual flea market for his “multifarious collections”
of reading notes, excerpts, and marginalia—the harvest of what he liked to
compare to digging for pearls in a dunghill. More than in his epics with their
voluminous notes, narrative here increasingly subserves a discursive and
antiquarian purpose, to become at last a grotesque parody of Southeyan
garrulousness and packrat mentality.
The
narrative—what there is of it—projects essentially a nostalgic, agrarian idyll
of the good old days before the eruption of revolutionary modernity. Dr. Daniel
Dove, Shandean country physician and “flossofer,” and represented as the mentor
of the anonymous narrator’s youth, is in fact an idealized self-portrait of
“Dr. Southey” and mouthpiece for a Southeyan ideal of naive common sense,
curious learning, domestic prudence, affection, and piety. He is surrounded by
a cast of similarly innocuous characters. In some respects The Doctor, &c.
not only echoes Tristram Shandy but anticipates both Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor
Resartus (1833–1834) and the comic genre painting of Dickens’s Pickwick Papers
(1836–1837). But it lacks the Faustian perplexity of the one and the Protean
abundance of the other, as well as Sterne’s Pyrrhonic wit. The book contains
some true gems, including the famous story of “The Three Bears”, which Southey
seems to have derived in youth from his “half-saved” half uncle William Tyler
(represented in The Doctor, &c. as Daniel’s brother William Dove) and whose
whimsical tone and spare, patterned folktale-like narration seem almost
miraculous in the midst of so much logorrhea and have earned the tale a
permanent place in the literature of the nursery. At their best the sketches and
ruminations and “tattle-de-moys” of The Doctor, &c. have the unflagging
curiosity, unbuttoned charm, and amiable chattiness of Southey’s
correspondence, which some critics value above his formal works. But too much
in The Doctor, &c. is sentimental in its idylls, coy and feeble in its
humor, commonplace and parochial in its conservatism, and obsessive in its
frenetic wordplays and Burtonesque fascination with exploded opinions and
bizarre trivia.
Southey
has been called the architect and chief practitioner of a “Georgian style” in
prose, a style that is pure and practical, in contrast to the ponderous and
ornate solemnity of the likes of Samuel Johnson or Edward Gibbon or the
rhetorical overkill of Edmund Burke. In trying to characterize Southey’s style,
one is apt to resort to negative terms: he does not have the intellectual
substance and subtlety of Coleridge, or the mercurial wit and quaint charm of
Charles Lamb, or the trenchancy and keen observation of William Hazlitt or Jane
Austen, or the symphonic splendor of Thomas De Quincey, or the figurative force
and transcendental extravagance of Thomas Carlyle, to mention only some chief
contemporaries. His prose never becomes an aesthetic end in itself, and, when
it does try to do so, as in portions of The Doctor, &c. it fails by
straining too hard. Its closest antecedents and parallels are perhaps to be
found in the unpretentious felicity of Joseph Addison and the workmanlike
language of Walter Scott. To the least prepossessed reader Southey’s writing will
often appear colorless and nondescript, poor in striking adjectives and
arresting metaphors and given to passive verbs and constructions, and in its
less guarded moments as loquacious and puerile. On balance, however, his prose
is a model of transparent functionalism: clear, simple, direct, and vigorous;
largely paratactic, but varied in its rhythms and sentence lengths; seemingly
artless, yet taut, polished, and economical when time constraints did not
promote makeshift; rhetorically forceful where appropriate in its use of
alliteration, anaphora, and extended metaphor (often derived from the areas of
warfare, travel, navigation, horticulture, and especially, medicine); and,
above all, astonishing in its tireless abundance.
If
in the final analysis Southey has less to say to today’s reader than the other
leading Romantics; if his causes seem dead, his ideas obsolete, his
multitudinous researches inert; if with all his talent and energy, curiosity,
and industry he is rarely touching or profound, it is largely because almost
all his information and inspiration is only secondhand, derived from the books
he read, accumulated, and worshipped in his 14,000-volume library, rather than
also the fruit of hazardous experience and introspection. To be an author meant
to transmit authority rather than to explore strange seas of thought as his
fellow Romantics did. His life after the move to Keswick in 1803 was not
without signal, even shattering events, such as the death of several children,
including his first-born and his beloved first son and playmate, Herbert, or
his many intense friendships, including several with women, one of whom, the
poet Caroline Anne Bowles, he married on June 4, 1839—after 20 years of
intimate correspondence—after the death in 1837 of the by then demented Edith
Southey. But rather than opening his imagination fully to the force of the
human condition, they caused him to retreat to the high ground of received
beliefs. Although he always remained a somewhat truculent individualist, had
doubts about some religious orthodoxies, and roamed to the ends of the earth
and the beginnings of history in his reveries and researches, he was, after his
early years, a staunch and even bigoted defender of both political and
ecclesiastical hierarchies (if not always of their doctrines), and he turned
down all job offers from newspapers, libraries, and universities that might
have taken him away from the Lake District. He was endlessly curious about
human nature but would not face it, whether in others or himself, except in the
less volatile form of human culture, most of which he ended up despising as
immoral or irrational, seditious or superstitious, dirty or even diabolical.
His own mind eventually failed, after a lifetime of repressed passion and
herculean compensatory labor, and he died of a stroke on the vernal equinox of
1843. He was buried in Crosthwaite Churchyard in Keswick, alongside his first
wife and three of his children.
Reputation
Charles
Lamb, in a letter to Coleridge, stated, "With Joan of Arc I have been
delighted, amazed. I had not presumed to expect of any thing of such excellence
from Southey. Why the poem is alone sufficient to redeem the character of the
age we live in from the imputation of degenerating in Poetry [...] On the
whole, I expect Southey one day to rival Milton."
Regarding
Thalaba the Destroyer, Ernest Bernhard-Kabisch pointed out that "Few
readers have been as enthusiastic about it as Cardinal Newman who considered it
the most 'morally sublime' of English poems. But the young Shelley reckoned it
his favourite poem, and both he and Keats followed its lead in some of their
verse narratives."
While
Southey was writing Madoc, Coleridge believed that the poem would be superior
to the Aeneid.
Robert
Southey had a notable influence on Russian literature. Pushkin highly
appreciated his work and translated the beginning of the Hymn to the Penates
and Madoc, and was also inspired by the plot of Roderick to create an original
poem on the same plot (Родрик). At the beginning of the 20th century, Southey
was translated by Gumilyov and Lozinsky. In 1922, the publishing house
"Vsemirnaya Literatura" published the first separate edition of
Southey's ballads in Russia, compiled by Gumilyov. In 2006, a bilingual edition
prepared by E. Witkowski was published, a significant part of which included
new translations.
Southey
was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1822. He was also a
member of the Royal Spanish Academy.
In
popular culture
In
the video game Book of Hours, released in 2023 by Weather Factory, the Southey
family are good friends with the fictional Baroness Eva Dewulf, and there are
rumours that they adopted her illegitimate child as Abra Southey and presented
her as the younger sister to Robert.
Partial
list of works
Harold,
or, The Castle of Morford (an unpublished Robin Hood novel that Southey wrote
in 1791).
The
Fall of Robespierre (1794) (with Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
Poems: Containing the Retrospect, Odes, Elegies, Sonnets, &c. (with
Robert Lovell)
Joan
of Arc (1796)
Icelandic
Poetry, or The Edda of Sæmund (contributing an introductory epistle to A. S.
Cottle's translations, 1797)
Poems
(1797–1799)
Letters
Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal (1797)
St.
Patrick's Purgatory (1798)
After
Blenheim (1798)
The
Devil's Thoughts (1799). Revised ed. pub. in 1827 as "The Devil's
Walk". (with Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
English
Eclogues (1799)
The
Old Man's Comforts and How He Gained Them (1799)
Thalaba
the Destroyer (1801)
The
Inchcape Rock (1802)
Madoc
(1805)
Letters
from England: By Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (1807), the observations of a
fictitious Spaniard.
Chronicle
of the Cid, from the Spanish (1808)
The
Curse of Kehama (1810)
History
of Brazil (3 vols.) (1810–1819)[21][22]
The
Life of Horatio, Lord Viscount Nelson (1813)
Roderick
the Last of the Goths (1814)
Journal
of a tour in the Netherlands in the autumn of 1815 (1902)
Sir
Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur (1817)
Wat
Tyler: A Dramatic Poem (1817; written in 1794)
Cataract
of Lodore (1820)
The
Life of Wesley; and Rise and Progress of Methodism (2 vols.) (1820)
What
Are Little Boys Made Of? (1820)
A
Vision of Judgement (1821)
History
of the Peninsular War, 1807–1814 (3 vols.) (1823–1832)
Sir Thomas More; or, Colloquies on the Progress and
Prospects of Society (1829)
The Works of William Cowper, 15 vols., ed. (1833–1837)
Lives of the British Admirals, with an Introductory View
of the Naval History of England (5 vols.) (1833–40); republished as
"English Seamen" in 1895.
The Doctor (7 vols.) (1834–1847). Includes The Story of
the Three Bears (1837).
The Poetical Works of Robert Southey, Collected by
Himself (1837)
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