Robert Southey

• 1. Introduction

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  Robert Southey arrived at Balliol College, Oxford, carrying, by his own account, a head full of Rousseau and Werther and a heart full of poetry. His religious convictions had already been rattled by Gibbon. He was eighteen, ambitious, and convinced he was going to change the world. He would spend the next fifty years doing the opposite of what he planned.

  Born on the 12th of August 1774 in Wine Street, Bristol, Southey grew up to become one of the most talked-about literary figures in England. He held the office of Poet Laureate for thirty years. He was a close friend and sometime collaborator of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was attacked, mocked, and parodied by Lord Byron. He wrote the original version of what would become the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

  And yet today his name draws a blank from most readers.

  What happened? Was he a sellout, as Byron insisted? A principled convert, as he himself maintained? Or simply a man whose prodigious output never quite cohered into a masterpiece that outlasted him? The answers live in the arc of a long, turbulent, and surprisingly strange life.

• 2. The Making of a Radical

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  Westminster School expelled Southey before he ever reached Oxford. The offence was an article he had written in The Flagellant, a magazine he himself had founded, which attributed the invention of flogging to the Devil. It was a bold opening act for a boy who had not yet turned twenty.

  At Oxford, the radicalism deepened. He left the university with little to show academically, admitting later that all he had learned was a little swimming and a little boating. What Oxford gave him instead was proximity to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a partnership that would shape his early career. Their first major joint project was The Fall of Robespierre, written together in 1794, the same year Southey published his first collection of poems.

  That same year, Southey and Coleridge sketched out one of the more eccentric proposals in literary history. They and a small circle of friends, including Robert Lovell, debated founding an idealistic community called a "pantisocracy" on the banks of the Susquehanna River in America. The project never left the talking stage, but it signals how seriously Southey took utopian politics at this point in his life.

  In 1795 he married Edith Fricker, whose sister Sara married Coleridge, binding the two poets into a family unit as well as a literary one. That same year Southey travelled to Portugal and drafted Joan of Arc, which was published in 1796. Charles Lamb, in a letter to Coleridge, called it sufficient to redeem the age from the charge of degenerating in Poetry, and predicted that Southey would one day rival Milton.

• 3. Laughing Gas and Laureate

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  In 1799, Southey and Coleridge found themselves involved in something altogether different from poetry: early experiments with nitrous oxide, conducted by the Cornish scientist Humphry Davy. The laughing gas trials were part of Davy's pioneering research, and both poets were among the willing subjects.

  By 1807, the years of financial precarity were easing slightly. Southey received a government pension that year, and in 1809 he began a long association with the Quarterly Review, which he would later describe as almost his only reliable source of income for most of his adult life.

  The laureateship came in 1813, a post he eventually came greatly to dislike. The role carried obligations to produce celebratory verse on command, the kind of work that made him vulnerable to the charge of sycophancy. Byron later mocked him in the long ironic dedication to Don Juan, dismissing Southey as insolent, narrow, and shabby. That same year, 1813, Southey published The Life of Horatio, Lord Viscount Nelson, a biography that has rarely been out of print since its first appearance, and which was adapted as a British film in 1926.

  In 1819, Southey joined the Scottish civil engineer Thomas Telford on a tour of Telford's infrastructure works across Scotland. Southey nicknamed Telford the "Colossus of Roads." The tour took in the Caledonian Canal, which would open three years later, along with roads, bridges, and harbour works. Southey's account of the journey, Journal of a Tour in Scotland in 1819, records both the engineering and his own impressions of the Scottish landscape and people.

• 4. The War with Byron

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  Much of the animosity between Southey and Byron traced back to a specific accusation. Byron believed that Southey had spread rumours about him and Percy Bysshe Shelley being in a "League of Incest" during their time together on Lake Geneva in 1816. Southey strenuously denied the charge, but the damage was done.

  In 1821, Southey published A Vision of Judgment to mark the death of George III. The preface attacked what Southey called the Satanic School among modern poets, clearly aimed at Byron without naming him. Byron retaliated with The Vision of Judgment, a parody of Southey's poem, and continued his assault in Don Juan, where Southey appears in the ironic dedication.

  The conflict had a political as well as a personal dimension. Byron saw Southey's turn toward conservatism as a betrayal of the radical principles both men had once shared. William Hazlitt made the same argument in The Spirit of the Age, writing that Southey had wooed Liberty as a youthful lover, but perhaps more as a mistress than a bride, and had since wedded an elderly and not very reputable lady called Legitimacy.

  Southey was also satirised by Thomas Love Peacock in the 1817 novel Melincourt, where he appears as the character Mr. Feathernest. When the MP William Smith rose in the House of Commons on the 14th of March to attack Southey publicly, Southey replied with an open letter. He argued that he had always aimed at lessening human misery, and had changed only in his view of the means by which that improvement was to be achieved.

• 5. Conservative with Complications

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  Southey's political conservatism was real, but it contained some striking exceptions. He argued against parliamentary reform with the memorable phrase "the railroad to ruin with the Devil for driver," blamed the Peterloo Massacre on what he called a revolutionary rabble, and supported the prosecution of radical writers. He had specifically in mind Thomas Jonathan Wooler and William Hone; both were acquitted, but the threat was enough to push William Cobbett to emigrate temporarily to the United States.

  At the same time, Southey was appalled by conditions in cities like Birmingham and Manchester. He was an early and outspoken critic of child labour in factories. He sympathised with the pioneering socialist plans of Robert Owen, advocated public works to maintain high employment, and called for universal education.

  In 1817, he privately proposed penal transportation for those guilty of libel or sedition, writing in the Quarterly Review that such writers were guilty of inflaming the turbulent temper of the manufacturer and disturbing the quiet attachment of the peasant to institutions under which he and his fathers had dwelt in peace.

  At the 1826 general election, the Earl of Radnor had Southey returned as MP for the pocket borough of Downton in Wiltshire, without Southey's prior knowledge. Southey refused to sit, triggering a by-election in December that year. He pleaded that he lacked a large enough estate for political life and declared that going into Parliament would be to commit a moral and intellectual suicide. In 1835, he also declined a baronetcy, accepting instead a life pension of £300 a year from Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel.

• 6. Legacy and Last Years

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  Southey's biography of Nelson, published in 1813, became the most enduring of his many works. He was equally prolific as a biographer of John Bunyan, John Wesley, William Cowper, and Oliver Cromwell, and as a historian of Brazil and the Peninsular War.

  His literary reputation during his lifetime was considerable among those who took him seriously. The young Shelley named Thalaba the Destroyer his favourite poem, and both Shelley and Keats drew on it for some of their verse narratives. Cardinal Newman reportedly considered the same poem the most morally sublime of English poems. Pushkin translated parts of Southey's Hymn to the Penates and Madoc into Russian, and was inspired by Roderick to write an original poem on the same subject. In 1822, Southey was elected to the American Antiquarian Society.

  Edith Southey died in 1837, and Southey remarried on the 4th of June 1839, to Caroline Anne Bowles, herself a poet. The marriage was troubled by his advancing dementia. His last letter to the writer Walter Savage Landor was written in 1839, when his mind was already failing; yet even as his memory collapsed, he continued to speak Landor's name when he could no longer recall anyone else.

  Southey died on the 21st of March 1843 and was buried in the churchyard of Crosthwaite Church in Keswick, where he had worshipped for forty years. William Wordsworth, his fellow Lake Poet and longtime friend, wrote the epitaph on his memorial inside the church. Of all the works buried with his reputation, one outlasted everything: the story of the Three Bears, which first appeared in the seventh volume of his sprawling miscellany The Doctor in 1837, and which children around the world still hear today.