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Home , Curse of Kehama, Henry Herbert Southey, Henry Taylor (dramatist), Joan of Arc (poem), Robert Lovell, Robert Southey

特別寄稿論文

Robert Southey’s Career

Nicholas Roe

Synopsis The essay concerns some of the paradoxes of ’s career, which stretched from the through to the early Victorian era, in particular continuities between his early revolutionary enthusiasm and the relentless energy of his professional life as a writer. His presence in anthologies is surveyed, and a range of critical responses is discussed. Finally, by way of identifying a more personal formative circumstance that may have shaped and impelled his life and writings, the essay explores the signifi cance of a memory from Southey’s early boyhood.

* * *

‘There is about [Southey] and his career something unexplained’, Rannie mused in 1907, ‘a touch of paradox, a trace of the injustice of fame, which makes him interesting’.1 Appointed Poet in 1813, Southey was acknowledged the most accomplished and productive writer of the age; yet for later generations he came to seem insignifi cant, irrel- evant, even an embarrassment when considered alongside his Romantic contemporaries. His unfl agging energy and teeming publications might even appear suspicious, impelled by ‘the early shaping given to his mind’ during the French Revolution – ‘decidedly revolutionary’, said Hazlitt, ‘the distraction of the time has unsettled him’.2 Looking to Southey’s childhood, Seamus Perry has suggested that a ‘formative disorientation and self-estrangement’ might explain the peculiarity of Southey’s career; thus, his unremitting work, year after year, may have been a way of blocking-off memories of disruptive ‘pullings-apart’ and fragmentations.3

[ 1 ] 2 Nicholas Roe

In seeking other contextual factors, Bill Speck explains that with the rise of nineteenth-century ideas of Romantic genius – to which Southey largely did not conform – ‘his stock slumped’, and his works were neglected.4 The reality is however stranger and more paradoxical, for while Southey has never been entirely neglected, critics and commentators have been unable to reach a consensus about the nature of his achievement – as if infected by something disjointed and restless in Southey himself. The ‘Jacobin’ poet of the ‘Botany Bay Eclogues’ and became the Laureate poet of A Vision of Judgement; having written a series of experimental verse epics, he concentrated his energies on prose writings – biographies, social commentary, a novel. In this article I want to explore the nature of fame’s injustice to Southey, through nineteenth and twentieth-century literary histories and anthologies and a range of critical views. I’ll then offer some remarks about Southey’s autobiographical refl ections, and will conclude by speculating about one darkly ‘formative disorientation’ that may have shaped Southey’s career and some aspects of posterity’s view of him. Southey’s presence in anthologies of poetry has been inconsistent, with a marked decline in twentieth and twenty-fi rst century collections. Most frequently anthologized were extracts from The and Thalaba (often minus their notes) followed by Mary the Maid of the Inn, excerpts from Roderick, His Books, The Holly Tree, Inchcape Rock, and Botany Bay Eclogues. His output is most fully represented in Beeton’s Great Book of Poetry (1881, fi fteen poems) and T. H.Ward’s English Poets (1880, eight poems), while Francis Palgrave’s fi rst Golden Treasury (1861) has just two poems: ‘The Battle of Blenheim’ and ‘My Days among the Dead’ (Byron had 8 poems, Keats and Shelley 11 and 22, Wordsworth 41). A clutch of lyrics and extracts from Thalaba and The Curse of Kehama appeared in One Thousand and One Gems of Poetry (1867) and Mrs. Valentine’s Gems of National Poetry (1881). Ten years later Bohn’s four-volume Standard Library of British Poets omitted Southey but did include Charlotte Smith and Robert Bloomfi eld. On the threshold of the new century Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse (1900) included only ‘My Days among the Dead’ and mis- indexed it (as did the many later impressions of this book). The English Parnassus: An Anthology of Longer Poems (1909), in which one might expect Southey to have fared better, contained nothing by him – nor did Robert Southey’s Career 3

Sir Henry Newbolt’s Book of Verse Chosen for Students at Home and Abroad (1922). Southey did not survive in Immortal Verse, published at New York in 1929; he wasn’t selected for The Path to Parnassus: An Anthology for Schools (1940) or for the Oxford schoolbook of Fifteen Poets (1941). Even The Cambridge Book of Lesser Poets (1927) ignored him. Helen Gardner left Southey out of her New Oxford Book of English Verse (1972), so did Christopher Ricks’s Oxford Book of English Verse (1999). Humphrey Milford’s Oxford Book of English Verse of the Romantic Period (1928) contained ‘The Battle of Blenheim’, ‘The Old Woman of Berkeley’, ‘Inchcape Rock’, ‘God’s Judgement on a Wicked Bishop’, ‘My Days among the Dead’, and extracts from Kehama; at the other end of the century Jerome McGann’s New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse (1993) admitted just one complete poem by Southey, ‘The Widow’, with extracts from Thalaba and Kehama. It is understandable, then, that for many years Southey’s reputation rested to some extent upon ideas of unjust neglect. ‘[S]o far, posterity has left Robert Southey severely alone’, judged James Darmesteter in 1896, a comment that does not quite square with Southey’s patchy representation in anthologies or Marilyn Butler’s contention, nearly a century later, that Southey is ‘no longer currently much read’.5 His scanty presence in Victorian anthologies shows that a few of his poems were accessible, and in his own time his books had sold well: Roderick had a print run of 7,000 copies (1814–26); Joan of Arc, 6,000 (1796–1806); Thalaba, 3,500 (1801–21); , 3,000 (1805-24); and The Curse of Kehama, 1,250 (1810–11).6 ‘The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo’ (1816) appeared by 10 May 1816 in a fi rst edition of 2,000 copies, and had sold 1,500 by 20 May.7 His biographies of Nelson and Wesley drew numerous readers in the nineteenth century, and references to him in the TLS archive point to twentieth-century awareness with a gathering of critical and editorial at- tention in recent years. When Butler’s Romantics Rebels and Reactionaries appeared in 1981, Southey’s poetry had been discussed at length in Mary Jacobus’s Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s (1976), in Jonathan Wordsworth’s Music of Humanity (1969), and, ear- lier, in major twentieth-century studies and editions by Geoffrey Carnall, Jack Simmons, Kenneth Curry and William Haller. Southey studies since 1981 have built upon these foundations, most notably in the distinguished editorial work on his poetry and letters by Lynda Pratt and Tim Fulford, 4 Nicholas Roe in biographies by Mark Storey and Bill Speck, and critical studies such as Christopher J. P. Smith’s A Quest for Home (1997) and David Fairer’s Organising Poetry: The Coleridge Circle, 1790–1798 (2009). Seen in a long perspective Southey’s representation in literary-critical studies has been hindered by the issue of how we ‘read’ Southey and other poets who don’t fi t more established paradigms of what Romantic poets are. Often it has been stalled by a ‘general refusal to look at the poetry it- self’, a refusal that has reinforced the myth of neglect.8 This phenomenon, established early, is one of the oddities of his career and subsequent recep- tion. At the end of the nineteenth century, for instance, Southey’s position appeared hopeless, ‘no longer read save in a few facile ballads’, according to James Darmesteter.9 ‘He worked early and late, well and ill’, a rueful Mrs Oliphant told her readers, ‘[b]ut he did not get the prize from heaven. In his excellence he was left low down in the lower room, and no one said to him, “Come up higher”’. David Rannie put the case that ‘[n]o great English writer calls out more urgently for reconsideration than Southey’, yet in the mid-twentieth century Henry Dyson and John Butt observed that ‘[no] attempt has ever been made to collect all Southey’s numerous writings. Nor would such an attempt be valuable’.10 ‘[U]rgent for reconsideration . . . [n]or would such an attempt be valuable’: these two comments, separated by some thirty years, alert us to a persistent equivocation over Southey’s merits – his ‘good-bad poetry’, as David Bromwich has described it.11 The tendency had been evident in William Taylor’s review of Thalaba in December 1803: ‘Perhaps no work of art so imperfect ever announced such power in the artist – perhaps no artist so powerful ever rested his fame on so imperfect a production – as Thalaba . . . it leaves a strong, but a confused and confusing impres- sion’.12 If we move forward two hundred years, Seamus Perry’s account of Southey’s bad-good poetry presents a similar outline of powerful imperfection:

[Southey’s] epics – those enormous, hectic combinations of extremes – are mostly not what you would consider good poetry, but that might tell us as much about what we ordinarily call good poetry as it does about Southey’s merits; and it’s true that what’s best about these poems, their broad narrative push and gaudy weirdness, is not the sort of thing that modern practitioners of Eng. Lit. have much to say about. On Robert Southey’s Career 5

the other hand, no amount of critical relativism is likely to persuade many readers that language is being used in particularly deft or subtle ways.13

Are modern readers, confused by Southey as Taylor had been, simply unable to credit what’s ‘best’ in his poems? At St Andrews University a diligent nineteenth-century reader of the fi rst edition of Roderick pencilled above the endnotes: ‘Southey’s notes are always more interesting than his poetry! Where lies the fault? In the poet or in the readers?’ It’s a bright question, for when other students read the poem their marginal comments were praising: ‘eloquent’, ‘sublime’, ‘well-done’, ‘Good Bob’, ‘natural’, ‘good description’, ‘graphic’, ‘beautiful indeed worthy of Byron’. Most readers appear to have been in two minds about his poems. ‘[T]his cel- ebrated performance . . . is trailing, fl at and uninteresting – defi cient both in strength and animation’, one early reviewer noted of Madoc, adding, ‘upon the whole we think very highly of [it]’.14 Wordsworth welcomed a copy of Joan of Arc sent by as a ‘highly acceptable present’, then dismissed Southey as a ‘coxcomb’ whose poem contained ‘pas- sages of fi rst rate excellence’ albeit of ‘very inferior execution’.15 was ‘delighted, amazed’ by a ‘fi ne and faultless’ Joan of Arc, until Coleridge encouraged him to see it differently.16 A critic who praised Southey’s ‘ingenuity and fertility’ also found him, in the same sentence, to have been ‘a genius radically imitative’.17 To another, Southey was ‘a revolutionist, who violently breaks with tradition’ yet, at the same time, casts back and ‘fi nds his models’ for Joan of Arc, Thalaba and Kehama ‘in the great masters of the epic’. ‘Southey was a poet’, protested Professor Scherr in 1882, ‘and one of the most imaginative and productive that England has ever possessed’. Turn on the calendar one hundred years, and Robert Woof, speaking at Southey’s bicentenary in 1974, presented the opposite view: Southey’s achievement was ‘in many ways . . . not that of a poet but of an anti-poet’ (compare Edmund Gosse, for whom Southey ‘was not, in any intelligible sense, himself a poet’).18 To a ‘Wordsworthian’ the label ‘anti-poet’ might be high praise, in that the experimental agenda of Lyrical Ballads had anticipated that readers of the book would ‘look around for poetry, and . . . be induced to enquire by what species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title’.19 Southey in the 1790s was occasionally an ‘anti-poet’ in this Wordsworthian sense, 6 Nicholas Roe formally and linguistically experimental in his lyrics and ‘hectic’ epics; to that extent, he might appear to be seeking a readership unswayed by ‘pre- established codes of decision’.20 Less radically, his autobiographical poem The Retrospect (1795) had developed the introspective manner of Thomas Warton and William Lisle Bowles, tracing the ‘alter’d scenes where once I bore a part’ and opening the way for ‘’ and . Subtle, complex and fascinating in itself, The Retrospect is also in many ways a proto-Prelude, not least so in its insight that ‘trifl ing objects . . . remain imprest’ in the mind by the force of emotion.21 For this reason George Saintsbury placed Southey ahead of the others, ‘particularly infl u- ential . . . when better poets of his own age were still forming themselves and . . . had not produced anything’.22 Southey’s precedence had also been evident to Francis Jeffrey in 1802 when he inaugurated the ‘Lake School’ of poets, and his enabling infl uence for later poets is everywhere apparent in ‘Resolution and Independence’, ‘’, Queen Mab, Endymion and Hyperion, and in Byron’s oriental romances. These differing views of Southey are not simply at odds with each other, nor are they wholly explicable in terms of changing scholarly fash- ions, altered literary tastes, or mere differences of opinion (although they are all of those). Persisting over the long term, they seem to arise from a strange skewing inherent to Southey’s poetry, as W. J. Dawson noted when he described it as ‘modern in form, but . . . wholly at variance with the modern spirit’; ‘with all its novelties of rhythm it is a survival of the past’ (a survival of epic in the age of personal lyrics; of exotic de- scription when gaudiness was deprecated; of superstition and legend over against psychological explanation).23 Instead of presenting a colloquial modernity, Southey’s ‘gorgeous and sublime imagery’, ‘strong legendary tastes’, and bookishness were merged in the elaborate ‘brocade fl ow of the draperies worn by his muse’.24 Thus, to William Dawson, Southey’s poetry appeared out of keeping with : ‘It is an interruption, the interpolation of a worn-out ideal, in the full current of new thoughts, and new ideals of poetry, which marked the beginning of the century’.25 But of course this was not how Francis Jeffrey had seen the matter when he pooled Wordsworth and Coleridge with Southey in the ‘Lake School’. Nor is it easy to credit the idea of Southey’s poetry as an extraordinary ‘inter- ruption’ for disclosing a ‘survival of the past’, when British as a whole had strong antiquarian leanings: Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’ Robert Southey’s Career 7 was ‘professedly written in imitation of the style, as well as the spirit of the elder poets’26; Wordsworth, Byron and Keats revived the ; Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound was based upon Aeschylus; Scott’s reached back to the middle ages. Still, it is clear that for many readers Southey had somehow failed to meld ‘tradition and experiment’, past survivals and modern ideals, in a way that spoke convincingly to contemporary readers: William Taylor found in Thalaba ‘a want of concatentation, of mutual dependence, of natural arrangement . . . the fable . . . wants cohesion; nor is it wholly consistent’.27 While Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age (1825) presented Lyrical Ballads as representative of an era, Southey’s poems continued to be diffi cult to ‘place’; they were ‘the very paradoxes of poetry’, Hazlitt decided, like the elusive, anomalous nature of the man himself – a one- time ‘revolutionist’ who became a tory Laureate, sat down and ‘made books out of other books’ with the patience of a monkish recluse who was also a ‘creature of impulse’.28 Southey is praised as the fond family man who sheltered and her children, yet is simultaneously found ‘defi cient in the human and natural’ – a man of ‘chilling reserve’.29 He could appear aloof and patrician, careworn and anxious, while to Thackeray he seemed ‘sublime in simplicity, . . . energy, . . . honour, [and] affection’. When met Southey he described him as seeth- ing with repressed passion, ‘capable of running mad’;30 perhaps those latent impulses found expression through the surges of violence, jittery restlessness, and self-destructive energies of Thalaba.31 Beneath Southey’s ‘conscientious virtue’, Lionel Madden decided, ‘the reader senses a savage violence lurking’.32 As a young man Southey had seemed easy to know, ‘truly a man of perpendicular Virtue – a downright upright Republican’ as Coleridge termed him.33 We know where the younger Southey stood on slavery and emancipation:

Did then the bold Slave rear at last the Sword Of Vengeance? Drench’d he deep its thirsty blade In the cold bosom of his tyrant lord? Oh! Who shall blame him . . . 34

As a ‘friend of humanity’ he supported the reform movement, and was 8 Nicholas Roe vocal on the rights and wrongs of women in ‘The Widow’, ‘The Soldier’s Wife’, and Joan of Arc. His identity in the early 1790s, like Coleridge’s, was initially rooted in the West Country and his native – then an important regional centre for dissenters and reformists. While some of his early poems engaged with international ‘Jacobin’ themes such as transportation, the slave trade, and women’s rights, the imagined locations of others are more local – the River Avon, Chepstow-Castle, Silbury Hill, Corston village, and Lansdown above Bath. Drawing on Thomas Warton’s and William Lisle Bowles’s poetry, Southey’s early lyr- ics develop and interweave personal feeling with landscape and topics of public concern. ‘Robert Southey’ thus emerged on the literary scene as a coherent fi gure, albeit one haunted by thoughts of loss and dispossession, drawn back to recollected scenes – ‘Each long-left scene, long left, but not forgot’.35 ‘The Retrospect’, with its invocations of ‘long-past joys’ and ‘long-lost friend’, was published when Southey was just twenty-one; although his sense of the literary marketplace was initially uncertain (his fi rst book was published with under the pseudonyms ‘Bion’ and ‘Moschus’) he was already composing himself for a literary market to which he knew this kind of elegiac poetry would appeal.36 As he grew older he sought to write for posterity (for example in his History of Brazil, 1810, and History of the Peninsular War, 1823), although much of his prose was also market-driven – his reviews for the Quarterly, his biographies of Nelson (1813) and Wesley (1820), and travelogues such as Letters from England (1807). As the business of writing became an end in itself, it is possible that Southey viewed its mechanical routines as a way of controlling tensions in himself. ‘[H]e did not give himself time to be a poet’, W. J. Dawson explained: ‘He was an immensely busy man’.37 Southey’s long settlement at Keswick contributed to his reputation in ’s Dictionary of National Biography as the ‘heroic man of letters’, whose ‘trumpet-sounds . . . came forth from his mountain dwelling to cheer and fortify the hearts of his countrymen’. Such cheering fortifi cation demanded tireless dedication; as Southey himself puts it: ‘in this great study . . . from breakfast till dinner, from dinner till tea, and from tea till supper . . . thus one day passes like another, and never did the days appear to pass so fast’.38 John Dennis tells us that ‘for nearly forty years [Southey] laboured at his calling with a hopefulness and assiduity that are well-nigh unparalleled’.39 Mrs. Oliphant agreed. ‘Southey was Robert Southey’s Career 9 always busy’, she explained in her Literary History of the Nineteenth Century, reminding readers on the next page that ‘He was so busy a man’, and again after more ten pages, ‘out of health and out of spirits [Southey was] busy, as always’.40 What drove Southey to this relentless regime? Partly it was out of fi nancial necessity and the need to meet publishers’ deadlines, but one senses as well that it may have been a cover for some kind of personal disquiet. ‘The Southey of Keswick was in temperament the Southey of ’, critic William Wallace said in 1896: ‘As he never lost the buoyancy of youth – the half-physical necessity to energise in some way or other – so he never overcame the defects of the early shaping given to his mind’. Southey’s unfocused restlessness – ‘in some way or other’ – was also noticed by Carlyle, who suggested that he was impelled to write by way of channelling energies that would have ‘torn him to pieces long ago’;41 directed outwards, those potentially self-destructive impulses enabled him to labour round the clock, in all the genres that could be marketed, to feed the new insatiable steam-presses. In a word, Southey was of the fi rst machine age. saw good in all of this. ‘It was [Southey’s] merit to have his faculties well in hand’, he explained:

he did not brood and contemplate, like Wordsworth; he did not dream and loiter, like Coleridge. He was ambitious of achievement; he accu- mulated and arranged; he taxed his nerve and invention; he was on the way to become a skilled literary craftsman.42

Had Southey’s fellow been omitted from this passage, his own virtues as a contributor to nineteenth-century print culture would stand more clearly on their own terms, as can be seen by rephrasing slightly what Dowden wrote: ‘With his faculties well in hand, Southey was ambi- tious of achievement; he accumulated and arranged; he taxed his nerve and invention; he was on the way to become a skilled literary craftsman’. This gives us Southey as a strenuous, dedicated, and accomplished writer – ‘on the way’ with his writing, as he had formerly hoped to embark for Pantisocracy. In Dowden’s original estimate, his extraordinary or- ganisational gifts, diligence and inventiveness appear diminished beside the Romantic inwardness of Wordsworthian brooding and Coleridge’s 10 Nicholas Roe prodigal genius to ‘dream and loiter’; framed thus, Dowden’s Southey ap- pears merely ‘on the way to become a skilled literary craftsman’ yet falling short of ultimate achievement. If we turn to another of Southey’s support- ers, George Saintsbury, a similarly ambivalent portrait emerges. Thalaba was ‘audaciously experimental’, Saintsbury claimed, albeit marred by irregular verse that ‘perpetually harasses and hampers the reader’, thus giving an effect of ‘something, perhaps, admirable, but somehow, not en- joyable’.43 It has often been argued that the experimental poems of Lyrical Ballads, ‘invent[ing] new principles’ for poetry, refl ected an age of revolu- tions in America and France: ‘[Y]ou have changed all things’, Edmund Burke observed of France, ‘you have invented new principles of order’.44 As Saintsbury shows us, Southey could also discompose the reader; more than any other writer except perhaps Blake, Southey’s energy, versatil- ity and changefulness communicated the audacious inventiveness of the times – always ‘on the way’, forever in prospect, never actually arrived at the point of achievement. Disinclined to brood, contemplate, dream and loiter, Southey had nevertheless absorbed the spirit of the French Revolution more completely than either Coleridge or Wordsworth. As a resident of Keswick Southey was apparently an affable gentle- man and distinguished writer, while more turbulent aspects of his person- ality found expression in the Gothicism and violence of some the poetry: the withered hands; the self-torturing jackal; the corpses; the Martyr, ‘pendant by the feet’, beaten to death. Southey’s ambition, his ‘unsurpassed literary industry’, the daring of Thalaba and Kehama, were all darkly driven; equally, the clockwork regularity of his routines, hour by hour, dawn to dusk, produced restless verse that refuses to settle into a stable form.45 ‘With Southey’, Hazlitt says, ‘everything is projecting, starting from its place, an episode, a digression’.46 But projecting, starting, digressing from what? If the writer in question was Wordsworth, say, any digression would be from The Recluse – and Wordsworth had deliberately likened that lifework to a gothic cathedral so as to accommodate his own diverse output of poetry within its greater structure. In Hazlitt’s snapshot of Southey, however, there was no comparably overarching purpose, no grand Recluse-like project; his life and works only made sense because of Southey’s need to continue writing, and as Carlyle hinted, without this ceaseless onward momentum his whole enterprise would fragment. Robert Southey’s Career 11

Byron’s Southey was the fi rst professional man of letters, a self-made writer who, for want of an alternative course in life, had directed his talents to the trade of making books. As a young middle-class man ‘start- ing from [his] place’, Southey had contemplated numerous career options and identities:

Oxford University An appointment in the East Indies An Anglican clergyman A medical career A post in the Exchequer Pantisocrat, supported by his writings Poet – of Joan of Arc and Poems 1795 and 1797 Editor of The Provincial Magazine Public lecturer on history Traveller and writer in Portugal A legal career Thinks of emigrating (1798) The Diplomatic Service Private Secretary to the Irish Chancellor A place in Portugal of some kind

There are threads that connect this list of seemingly disparate life-choices. The possibility of emigration takes various forms – colonial, pantiso- cratic, diplomatic – and, as Bill Speck noted, the idea of living by writing persisted from the Pantisocracy scheme of 1793 onwards.47 ‘We must go to America’, Southey had urged Coleridge; yet underlying that conviction was an uncertainty about his prospects that explains why – even as a young man – he held so tenaciously to familiar scenes, buildings, rooms, even pieces of furniture, with an intensity that bordered upon neurosis. In his commonplace book and letters he could call up the scene at his grandmother’s house in Bedminster in the minutest details:

The bower, the porch, the yews by the laundry, the yard horse-chestnuts, the mortality, as my grandmother called it . . . and then . . . the sound of Ashton bells . . . the family burying place. The best kitchen, the black boarded parlour, the great picture-bible . . . And then the old bird and beast book. I wish I had that book! An old book of natural history has such fi ne lies. I just remember the whale in it.48 12 Nicholas Roe

The particularity with which Southey details such scenes suggests that they provided him with an anchor when other bearings in his life offered scant security: as he refl ects in ‘The Retrospect’, ‘I stood alone / Unknowing all I saw, of all I saw unknown’ (Lovell and Southey, 10). Book-learning and book-making were Southey’s means of self-invention, of making himself known to himself and to others. Accordingly, aged sixty-three and drawing towards the end of his life, he set about editing his poetical works – confi dent of ‘their deserts’ and of the public’s ‘auspicious reception’: ‘I have . . . no cause to wish I had pursued a different course. In this, as in other circumstances of my life, I have reason to be thankful to that merciful Providence’.49 This was dated September 1837. As time passed, however, Southey’s assurance wavered: ‘all things considered, I do not think any circumstances could have been more benefi cial to me than those in which I have been placed’.50 And, elsewhere, ‘I was persuaded, against my inclination and in some degree against my judgment, to undertake such a revision of my poetical works’.51 Perhaps his reluctance stemmed from an awareness that it would be nec- essary to establish ‘the order wherein the respective poems were written’ so as to show ‘the progress of [the] author’s mind’.52 This last reference suggests that Southey was aware of how editions of Wordsworth’s poems were arranged, and of Wordsworth’s still-unpublished poem on the ‘growth of his own mind’ that would appear thirteen years later as The Prelude. Perhaps he was ruefully conscious, too, that the retrospective stance that initiated his career in ‘The Retrospect’, would in The Prelude be Wordsworth’s epic claim upon the future. How would Southey present his life and career for posterity? Charles Cuthbert Southey tells us that ‘in early life’ his father had ‘of- ten contemplated “writing the history of his own mind”’. A sequence of autobiographical letters to John May in the 1820s traces Southey’s life up to his time at (1788–92) but breaks-off at the thresh- old of University life, his meeting with Coleridge, and the Pantisocracy scheme. He kept copies of these letters for himself, undoubtedly with the idea of leaving them for his literary executor to draw on in any posthu- mous biography and, therefore, with an eye on posterity. A letter of 1837 explained why he had abandoned this ‘history of his own mind’: Robert Southey’s Career 13

Many years ago I began to write my own Life and Recollections in letters to an old and dear friend. About half a volume was produced in this way, till it became inconvenient to afford time for proceeding, – and, to confess the truth, my heart began to fail. This, no doubt, is the reason why so many proceed little beyond the stage of boyhood. So far all our recollections are delightful as well as vivid, and we remember everything; but when the cares and the griefs of life are to be raised up, it becomes too painful to live over the past again.53

Perhaps the careworn Poet Laureate reckoned that life beyond ‘The Retrospect’ would be intolerable ‘lived over again’: the demise of Pantisocracy; the trouble with Coleridge; the deaths of his mother, daughters Margaret and Emma, and son Herbert; the ‘’ debacle (1817) and furore over ‘A Vision of Judgement’ (1821). How could he raise up all of that again? It would make sense if he was reluctant to do so, especially after Hazlitt had publicly disparaged Wat Tyler and The Vision of Judgement as ‘the Alpha and Omega of his disjointed career’.54 Southey’s diffi culty in proceeding with his ‘Life and Recollections’ may also be related to a much earlier memory from his boyhood, and the far from delightful experience of his frequent sojourns with Aunt Tyler at Bath. When Miss Tyler died early in 1821, Southey had not spoken to her since 1795. Understandably she was on his mind as the dominant presence in his childhood, and on 7 April he wrote a letter recalling how he had slept in his aunt’s bed, and how in the mornings he was

obliged to lie till nine, and not infrequently till ten in the morning, and not daring to make the slightest movement which could disturb her during the hours that I lay awake, and longing to be set free. These were, indeed, early and severe lessons of patience. My poor little wits were upon the alert at those tedious hours of compulsory idleness, fan- cying fi gures and combinations of form in the curtains, and watching the light from the crevices in the window-shutters, till it served me at last by its progressive motion to measure the lapse of time.55

In those long hours of ‘compulsory idleness’, his only respite had con- sisted in ‘fancying fi gures and combinations’, on the alert to fi ll ‘lapses of time’ as he would later be, year by year, in his study. Perhaps in this 14 Nicholas Roe poignant memory we can trace a ‘formative disorientation’ that had initi- ated his imaginative life, determined its patterns and given it a direction: his relentless routines early and late, day after day, were a way of enforc- ing ‘compulsory hours’, hours from which ‘fancying’ was and continued to be a productive release. If this memory locates the unhappy origin of his life’s curious mingling of disciplined application with wild ‘starts’ and ‘projections’, what had begun as ‘lessons in patience’ for the little boy also became a way of shaping a life, and of giving purpose and meaning to a career choice – ‘being’ a writer – which for Southey had proved to be far from straightforward or without pain and confl ict. (Professor of English, University of St. Andrews)

(I am grateful to Professor Lynda Pratt for her careful reading of and suggestions for this essay.)

Notes 1 David Watson Rannie, Wordsworth and his Circle (, 1907), 92. 2 ‘Mr. Southey’ in (1825), The Complete Works of , ed. P. P. Howe, 21 Vols (London and Toronto, 1930–34), xi. 81, 85, hereafter ‘Mr. Southey’. 3 William Wallace, ‘Robert Southey, 1774–1843’, in English Prose, ed. Henry Craik, 5 vols (New York, 1916), v. Seamus Perry, ‘Self-Management’, London Review of Books (26 January 2006), 18–21. For ‘pullings-apart’ see Christopher J. P. Smith, A Quest for Home: Reading Robert Southey (Liverpool, 1997), 8. 4 Bill Speck, Robert Southey. Entire Man of Letters (London and New Haven, 2006), xvi. 5 James Darmesteter, English Studies (London, 1896), 51; Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: and its Background 1760–1830 (Oxford, 1981), 10. 6 See William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge, 2004), 653–4. 7 Robert Southey, Later Poetical Works, gen. eds. Tim Fulford and Lynda Pratt; volume eds. Carol Bolton, Rachel Crawford, Ian Packer, Diego Saglia and Daniel E. White, 4 vols (London, 2012), iii. 228. 8 A Quest for Home, 1. 9 Darmesteter, 50; Lynda Pratt tells me that this kind of value judgement Robert Southey’s Career 15 still dogs Southey – for the most recent example see in the Daily Telegraph, 12 June 2015: ‘I go across the road to the Ship Inn for a drink, an ale house dating back to the 13th century, and I sit in the beer garden with my notebook open and pen in hand. Poet Laureate Robert Southey was said to have knocked off a poem while leaning on the bar at the Ship, the “Porlock”, with its somewhat obsequious tone and complacent rhymes, leading me to wonder if he was after a free drink or even a room for the night’. ‘Porlock’ is a product of Southey’s own very interesting south west walking tour of 1799 – a point when his still radical politics combined with invasion scares to make him feel anything but ‘obsequious’ or ‘complacent’. 10 Mrs. Oliphant, The Literary History of England in the End of the Eighteenth and Beginning of the Nineteenth (Vol. 1) (London, 1887), 345; Rannie, 92; H.V.D. Dyson and John Butt, Augustans and Romantics 1689–1930 (2nd edn., London, 1940), 202. 11 ‘Of the Mule Breed’, London Review of Books (21 May 1998), 10–11. 12 Critical Review (December 1803), rpt. in Robert Southey: The Critical Heritage, ed. Lionel Madden (London and Boston, 1972), 91, 92. Hereafter CH. 13 London Review of Books (26 January 2006), 18–21. 14 Imperial Review (November, 1805), in CH, 105. 15 The Letters of William and , arranged and edited by the Late Ernest De Selincourt, 2nd edn., I (The Early Years 1787–1805), rev. C. L. Shaver (Oxford, 1967), 163, 169. 16 See The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, ed. Edwin W. Marrs, 3 vols (Ithaca and London, 1975–8), i. 15, and for Lamb’s ‘second thoughts’, i. 28. This episode was infl ected by a set of literary friendships and rivalries in the years 1794–8, and by what David Fairer has termed the ‘complex negotiations that friendship with Coleridge demanded’; see Organising Poetry: The Coleridge Circle, 1790–1798 (Oxford, 2009), 234, hereafter Organising Poetry. 17 George L. Craik, Sketches of the History of Literature and Learning in England With Specimens of the Principal Writers (Vol. 5) (London, 1845), 418. 18 Professor Dr. J. Scherr, A History of English (London, 1882), 216–17; Robert Woof, Southey & Wordsworth: A Bicentenary Tribute to Robert Southey 1774–1843 (typescript; , 1974), 5; Edmund Gosse, A Short History of Modern English Literature (London, 1898), 287. 19 ‘Advertisement’ to Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (London, 1798), ii. 20 Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems, ii. 21 ‘The Retrospect’, in Robert Lovell and Robert Southey, Poems (Bath and London, 1795), 8. 16 Nicholas Roe

22 George Saintsbury, ‘Southey. Lesser poets of the Eighteenth Century’, The Cambridge History of English Literature (Cambridge, 1914), 161. 23 W. J. Dawson, The Making of Modern English (3 edn., London, 1892), 85. 24 Henry Chorley, The Authors of England (London, 1838), 31. 25 William Dawson, The Makers of Modern English: A Popular Handbook to the Greater Poets (London, 1891), 85. 26 Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems, iv–v. 27 Critical Review (December 1803), in CH, 92. 28 ‘Mr. Southey’, 80, 81. 29 Wordsworth and his Circle, 100–1. 30 For Thackeray, see The Four Georges (1860) quoted in Robert Southey. The Critical Heritage, ed. Lionel Madden (London, 1972), 454–5; for Carlyle, see Wordsworth and his Circle, 103. 31 For Thackeray, see The Four Georges (1860) in CH, 454–5; for Carlyle, see Wordsworth and his Circle, 103. 32 ‘Introduction’, CH, 31. 33 Coleridge to George Dyer, late February 1795, Collected Letters of , ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford, 1956–71), i. 152–3. 34 ‘Poems on the Slave Trade, Sonnet V’, Poems by Robert Southey, 2nd edn (Bristol and London, 1797). 35 Lovell and Southey, Poems, 12. 36 See David Fairer’s account of Southey’s ‘self-composing’, Organising Poetry, 119. 37 The Makers of Modern Poetry, 86. 38 To Tom Southey, 17 February 1804, Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. C. C. Southey, 6 vols (London, 1849-50), ii. 262, hereafter Life and Correspondence. 39 See the entry on Southey in the old DNB and John Dennis, Studies in English Literature (London 1876), 256. 40 Oliphant, i. 348, 350, 365. 41 Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences, ed. J. A. Froude, 2 vols (London, 1881), ii. 317. 42 Edward Dowden, The French Revolution and English Literature (London, 1897), 160. 43 George Saintsbury, ‘Southey. Lesser poets of the Eighteenth Century’, The Cambridge History of English Literature (Cambridge, 1914), 161. 44 Refl ections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in certain Societies in London Relative to that Event (London, 1790), 301. 45 Lynda Pratt points out that there is an interesting counterpoint to Southey’s day time labours in his restless dreams and nightmares – which (for a while) he Robert Southey’s Career 17 recorded. See the ‘Appendix’ in Edward Dowden’s edition of The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles (Dublin and London, 1881). 46 ‘Mr. Southey’, 81. 47 Entire Man of Letters, 55: ‘even when all prospects of emigration had faded, they did indeed live off their writings’. 48 ‘Ideas and Studies for Literary Composition’, Southey’s Common-Place Book. Fourth Series. Original Memoranda, Etc., ed. John Wood Warter (London, 1851), 193. 49 ‘Preface’ to The Poetical Works of Robert Southey, Collected by Himself, 10 vols (London, 1837), i. xviii, hereafter Poetical Works. 50 To , 10 June 1838, Life and Correspondence, vi. 370. 51 Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, vi. 362. 52 ‘Preface’ to Poetical Works, i. [v]. 53 Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, vi. 344. 54 ‘Mr. Southey’, 82. 55 Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, i. 35.

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