The early life of Robert Southey, 1774-1803

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COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY STUDIES IN ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

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Preface

There has been no adequate detailed biography of Southey. Charles Cuthbert Southey, who compiled a Life and Correspondence of his father, was not quahfied for his difficult task. Selections from the poet's published letters have given the leading circumstances especially of the later life, but the only approximation to a sympathetic and intelligent biography has been the characteristic sketch by the late Edward Dowden in the "English Men of Letters Series." At the same time, although it is long since many persons have read any of Southey's writings except The Three Bears, The Life of Nelson, The Battle of Blenheim, My Days Among the Dead are Past, and perhaps one or two other short pieces, a curiously positive, largely disagreeable and distorted impression of the man has persisted in the popular imagination. That impression I have small hope at this late day to correct, and no desire coinpletely to reverse. My purpose is merely to supply students with a faithful account of the most interesting and least known period in the life and work of an important English writer of a momentous time in history. This book covers, therefore, only the first twenty-nine years of Southey's career — his boyhood at school and university; his reactions to literary and political movements in his youth; his early associations with Coleridge, Lamb, Wordsworth, Humphry Davy, John Rickman, William Taylor of Norwich, and others; his share in a scheme of emigration to America for the purpose of establishing there a communistic society or " pantisocracy " ; his characteristics as a young man, poet, and man of letters, together with the rise of his peculiar literary and personal reputation in association with the group of men who came to be known as the "lake school";

Vlll PREFACE

and in conclusion his settling down in what was to be his final home at Keswick,

The materials for such a study have been ample. Southey's voluminousness, indeed, has been one of the chief reasons why the public has neglected without forgetting him. The basis and most of the details for the narrative of his life are to be found in the six volumes of letters published by Cuthbert Southey, the four volumes of letters published by Warter, the Reminiscences of the unreliable but indispensable Cottle, the letters of Coleridge, and the correspondence between Southey and William Taylor of Norwich published by the latter's biographer. These sources have been supplemented by information drawn from the works of Southey himself, from those of his contemporaries, from the numerous books which have appeared dealing with his friends and associates, from private persons, and from unpublished letters. The mass of Southey papers left by John Wood Warter is now in the possession of Miss Warter, the poet's grand-daughter. They are not at present accessible or available for publication. They have, however, been examined in a scholarly way by the Rev. Maurice H, FitzGerald, who has kindly supplied me with what he believes to be the only important information that they contain bearing upon Southey's early life. For additional facts I am indebted to Mr. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, and to unpublished letters of Southey and Coleridge in the British and the Victoria and Albert Museums. It should be added that little information concerning the period of Southey's life covered in the present work has been derived from sources not long accessible to the public, and it does not appear likely that much more waits to be unearthed. I have had access to some unpublished letters of Southey's to which I am unable specifically to refer, and many more no doubt remain undiscovered in private hands, but judging from what I have so far found,

PREFACE IX

it is probable that these date from the poet's later years and that they make few references to those exciting indiscretions of his earlier life which he never came to be ashamed of but which it pained him to recall. It is my intention, however, to continue the study here begun, and I shall be grateful to any person who will in any way supplement the information I possess concerning any period of Southey's life.

To the freemasonry of scholars I already owe several pleasurable debts. Mr. George B. Parks, Kellogg Fellow of Amherst College, ably assisted by Mr. Emery E. Neff, Cutting Fellow of Columbia University, has been skilful and indefatigable in examining manuscripts, writing letters, and interviewing persons for me in England. The Rev. Maurice H. FitzGerald and Mr. Ernest Hartley Coleridge have given me most kind assistance out of their knowledge of the subjects with which I have been dealing. Professors Ashley H. Thorndike and Ernest H. Wright have read and criticized this work while it was still in manuscript. For various courtesies I am indebted to Mr. E. V. Lucas, Captain Orlo Williams, the Rev. Canon H. D. Rawnsley, Mrs. Elizabeth D. Dowden, Professor James McLean Harper, the Rev. Walter W. Graham, the Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum at South Kensington, and above all to Mr. Frederic W. Erb and his assistants on the staff of the Library of Columbia University.

Two persons have assisted me to whom I can make no adequate acknowledgment. My wife is almost solely responsible for the compilation of Appendices B and C, and has given me other valuable help besides. Professor William P. Trent first suggested to me that such a book should be written, and in my writing of it he has given abundant aid out of his mastery of biographical research.

W. H.

Columbia University

Conclusion 311

Appendix A. Works of Robert Southey 313

Appendix B. Works Referred to in the Preface and Notes

TO Joan of Arc 327

Appendix C. Works Referred to in the Notes to Thalaba 330

Index 339

Introduction

"I have this conviction," wrote Southey, "that, die when I may, my memory is one of those which will smell sweet, and blossom in the dust." That the memory of Southey's poetry, a century after it was written, continues rather in the dust than in the bloom, — nothing in literary history is more sure. The reason is not hard to find. He did not lack the poetic impulse nor the vision of his poetic opportunity. The religion of nature, the faith in which kings were overthrown and peoples conceived in Europe and America, although it provided the most vital occasion for a great poem of idealism since Milton, had been as yet inadequately expressed in English poetry. This expression was to be achieved lyrically by Wordsworth, but Southey, a peculiarly sensitive and intense mind, also attempting it in all the new forms of poetry with which the rising generation^ Wordsworth included, was experimenting, finally settled down to the more ambitious purpose of embodying his faith in epic. He failed in this where no one else succeeded, and his failure the world has found it hard to forgive. An indubitable cause for this ill-success is to be found in his inability to achieve great style. Facility, eloquence, rhetorical skill of many orrts, and noble self-devotion to his task, — these he possessed, but not the power of harmony, the crash and splendor essential for great epic verse. At his best, it must be admitted, he does not fall far short of the mark, but in such a case the proverbial miss is indeed as bad as a mile.

Yet there was another cause for failure which might have been sufficient in itself to frustrate any epic that attempted to voice the creed of the deists. To begin with, the returnto-nature movement had no traditions, no roots in the realized past, no legends proper to itself. The revolution in America and more vividly the revolution in France vitalized the creed into a faith, but Napoleon and disillusionment followed so hard upon hope that the idealists were unable for long to find even in the present any series of momentous events to sanction their ideals. The effect upon Wordsworth was to drive him out of the current of life into eddying mysticism, and to confine his strictly intellectual activity chiefly to a struggle for reform in the style and subjects of poetry. The effect upon Southey was not so simple, nor his effort so limited. Engaging in similar but even wider experimentation in poetry, he attempted to find a great story in which to embody his ideals, but sought for it, not in the life of the disappointing present, nor of the conventionally familiar past, but in the new world which travel and inquiry were opening up to the imagination. The error was fatal for the epic poet, because this new world was too little known to be believed in as a sanction for faith, and was too soon found to be a far different world from the one he represented. Here the fundamental weakness of the religion of nature betrayed its own apostles; they fortified their ideals by facts which they pretended to observe, but blinked. We have forgiven Wordsworth's bad science; we have had no reason to forgive Southey's bad history.

Such is the underlying reason for the oblivion that has fallen upon the work of a man who was one of the most considerable figures of the day in which he lived. Other causes

INTRODUCTION 3

have contributed to the gloom. The ideals of Southey's faith were being defeated in his own day upon every hand. It seemed to him that nature was being thwarted, men were therefore being corrupted, and corruption was doing and would do deadly work. First had come unnatural tyranny in France, followed by equally monstrous mobrule and doubly monstrous usurpation. As for England, the time was not a happy one for those who believed that the industrial revolution was but increasing the corruption of an already corrupted populace to which parliamentary reform, catholic emancipation, and freedom of the press were offering increased power. "It cannot and it will not come to good," Southey cried to Carlyle at the end of life, with a passionate intensity of fear that amazed even that not uncongenial soul. Yet he did not flinch in his devotion to those ideals which were his only hope and upon which society seemed more and more to set its back. Neither did he shrink from the contemplation of danger. On the contrary, in epic and in review article, he broke lance after lance in defense of his faith against old and new evils, and even against old friends. Unlike Wordsworth, who dreamed and prosed and was afraid, Southey fought. Unfortunately for his fame, it was a losing fight, and his less simpleminded opponents misunderstood him as he misunderstood them, so that he, whose noble unworldliness kept him poor on the side of the party in power in a day of political sinecures, saw his name become the by-word for a turncoat and a truckler for pay. This might not have been sufficient in itself to have affected his reputation down to the present had it not been that his own pugnacious Quixotism drove him into exquisitely ridiculous, not to say asinine, postures which quite fairly rendered him the butt of Byron's titanic sneer. We do not altogether trust Byron, to be sure, but Southey's poems are many and long, and the Byron that lurks in each one of us has perpetuated the sneer.

For those who have felt the mjustice of this attitude, it has been difficult to find adequate argument for change. To overstate the merits of Southey's prose has not been the right way of making the truth about him known. To insist upon his virtues as a friend and the head of a household has not lessened his sins as a poet. There has remained but to examine thoroughly his life and work, and to state truthfully what is there to be found. This is a task hitherto unattempted, first because the legendary Southey has seemed so definite a figure that such a study has appeared forbidding and unnecessary, and then because the sheer labor of traversing the ramifications of the man's career and of reading his voluminous writings has deterred any who might not already have been intimidated by the tradition that he was dull. The present work attempts a beginning at the critical study of Southey, a study which, to many besides the present writer, it has seemed strange that no one has previously made. Yet the purpose of this book is not the rehabilitation of Southey's poetry, although if anything here said helps to discourage future condemnation of an author unread, so much the better. In a form of poetry in which, to succeed greatly, he had to undergo comparison with Spenser and Milton, Southey came, perhaps, nearer to success than any other Englishman up to his time, and failed. As it is, the mass of his forgotten verse contains beauties sufficient to have made the immortality of half a dozen second-rate poets who may have tempted Providence less boldly. This would have been reason enough in most cases for writing a man's biography, but Southey has more claims upon our interest. He was one of the most active spirits in a period of English history the influence of which is still alive among us. He expressed its ideals in close association with Wordsworth, and a study of his work throws some additional light upon that of the greater poet. Of even more importance, perhaps, is the

INTRODUCTION 5

fact that he entered eagerly, though half-bUndly, into the great new enterprise of historical and scientific study. History in many phases was his chosen field, but his avid learning touched most of the spheres of knowledge then attainable with something of a renaissance fervor and scope. Furthermore, though he shut himself in his library in an out-of-the-way corner of England, he played a vigorous part in the discussion of important questions of his time, made himself hated as the formidable foe of some of his most famous contemporaries, and respected or loved as the friend of many others. Finally, there remains as a reason for this book the common humanity in the man himself. A high-souled youth, passing through the yeasty yearnings and awkward starts of boyhood into a manhood of self-devotion to labor and to ideals that brought him poverty, disappointment, and unfulfilled renown, but not defeat, — the story of Southey's life has among men of letters seldom been surpassed in its genuine human interest and prolonged tragic intensity.

In 1820 Southey began an autobiography ^ in which he proposed, as Coleridge did in a similar abortive attempt^ and as Wordsworth did in The Prelude, to unfold "the history of his own mind," but with characteristic sensitiveness he found himself unable to continue the narrative beyond the point at which the most troubled period of his life began. In the fragment that remains, however, he tells us many illuminating things about his kindred and early boyhood.

Throughout his life, one of Southey's constant aspirations was to establish himself and his family on a firm footing

^ Recollections of the Early Life of Robert Southey, written by himself in a series of Letters to his Friend Mr. John May. These constitute the first 157 pages of Volume I of The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey edited by his son, the Rev. Charles Cuthbert Southey, 1849 (referred to hereafter as Life), and are the chief authority for sections i and II of the present chapter. Where no other reference is given, they may be taken as the source of all statements of fact.

2 Biographia Epistolaris being the Biographical Supplement of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria vrith additional letters, etc., edited by A. Turnbull. London, 1911, I, 5-22. (The editor has here repubUshed the Supplement of Henry Nelson and Sara Coleridge, together with such letters of Coleridge as have from time to time been published in various other places and are no longer under copjrright. Referred to as Biog. Epis.)

of gentility. Fruits of this aspiration we shall see both in his early revolutionary activities and in his later devotion to the established order. It is therefore interesting to note that to establish themselves had been the often baffled aim of Southey's ancestors for several generations. On the father's side they had hovered over the borders of gentility for a long time without achieving any particular distinction. Old aunts and uncles brought down traditions of a famous soldier who fought for the parliament in the rebellion, and of another who was out with Monmouth, but all else concerning both was forgotten. Indeed, so obscure was the name Southey, that the poet, who looked upon many printed pages in his day, never beheld it upon any of them except when applied to himself or his brothers. He did, nevertheless, accept his family's claim to a coat-of-arms, upon the strength of which he conjured up visions of a crusading Southey; antiquarian research^ has shrewdly surmised that these trappings had been acquired rather by an ancestor of later date in the law who found it convenient to borrow them from another family of similar name. Old wills at the cathedral town of Wells, as far back as 1533, and according to the poet, the parish register at Wellington as early as 1696, show that the Southeys were a race of yeomen, except for an occasional weaver, clothier, lawyer, gentleman, and in one branch a few generations of noblemen with the title Lord Somerville acquired through marriage. Obscure though they were, however, the Southeys were abundant in Somersetshire for over two centuries, and many during that time were the Roberts, Johns, and Thomases that bore the name.

Robert Southey was the name of the poet's father. He bad an elder brother, John, who was a surly bachelor, became a rich lawyer in Taunton, and left his fortune to

1 Arthur J. Jewers, Notes and Queries, Series 8, Vol. V, 141, 202, 241.

his youngest brother, Thomas, who remained merely a surly bachelor, and took pains not to leave the fortune to his poet-nephew. Robert Southey senior, on the other hand, was apparently an amiable youth of no very forceful character, who had been taught to cipher and then apprenticed to a kinsman, a grocer in London. Standing in the shop door one day, he saw a porter carrying a hare through the street, and tears came to his eyes for love of the country sports of boyhood he had left behind. The kinsman died, and his apprentice entered the shop of William Britton, linen-draper in Wine Street, Bristol, where he stayed for twelve or fourteen years. Eventually he opened a shop of his own in the same street. There he prospered for a time, but by and by his health failed, custom left him, and he seems not to have had the ability to push his fortune. His business collapsed in 1792, and shortly afterwards he died. He was evidently a rather dull person of little importance to his brilliant son.

The poet's maternal connections are of greater interest, since they concerned themselves more actively in the affairs of their kinsfolk. They were on the whole of somewhat higher social rank, being the daughters and younger sons of small gentry of the region. Southey 's grandmother came from a line of Bradfords and Crofts of Herefordshire, through whom it amused^ him to reckon his descent from Owen Glendower, Llewellyn, and Jorwerth, and so to claim 999th cousinship with his friend Wynn. This grandmother, Margaret Bradford, was twice married, first to a gentleman named John Tyler, by whom she had three children, the most notable of whom was Elizabeth Tyler, Southey's redoubtable aunt, and then to the poet's grandfather, Edward Hill, the seventh of the name in a long line of gentlemen who lived upon their own lands in the vale of Ashton. He

^ Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, edited by his son-in-law John Wood Warter 1856 (referred to as Warter), III, 516; IV, 408.

was a lawyer and a widower with two grown children at the time of this marriage, but he was also handsome, talented, convivial, and while courting the widow he made verses to express his jealousy of a certain young justice poetically denominated Strephon.

This almost middle-aged couple settled at Bedminster near Bristol in a comfortable farmhouse with a large garden where the Southey children were to spend much of their childhood. The Hills were by no means wealthy, but their son, Herbert, was sent to Christ Church, Oxford, took orders, and when about 1774 his half-sister Miss Tyler, in the course of her fashionable wanderings, went to Lisbon, he followed and eventually became chaplain to the British factorj'^ at that place after a term of service at Oporto.^ His own sister was Margaret, the poet's mother. She was born in 1752. Her son says of her, "Never was any human being blest with a sweeter temper or a happier disposition. She had an excellent understanding, and a readiness of apprehension which I have rarely known surpassed. In quickness of capacity, in the kindness of her nature, and in that kind of moral magnetism which wins the affections of all within its sphere, I never knew her equal." In looks she was said much to resemble the beautiful Miss Tyler, but her appearance was blighted in childhood by the smallpox. She was educated by her father to dance and whistle. Her half-brother, Edward Tyler, employed in some warehouse in Bristol, brought to Bedminster a friend named Robert Southey, to whom, although we may suspect that Miss Tyler could scarcely have approved the match, Margaret Hill was married in 1772 at the age of twenty.

Robert Southey, linen-draper, had a short time previously opened a shop for himself three doors above that of his old master in Wine Street in the crowded center of the town. ^ Vindidae Ecclesiae Anglicanae, 4.

A legacy of £100 from a kinsman, Cannon Southey, a similar sum of his younger brother Thomas's, who seems to have engaged in partnership with him for a time, a smaller sum of his wife's, perhaps some savings of his own, — these formed the capital of the new shop, and all began hopefully. In token of his boyish love of field-sports, the linen-draper took a hare as his device. Children, nine in all, came in quick succession to the Southeys. The first was a son in 1773, John Cannon, who died in infancy. The second, born August 12, 1774, was Robert Southey. Three more boys survived childhood : Thomas, who became a captain in the navy; Henry Herbert, who became a highly respected physician in London; and Edward, black sheep and rolling stone, first in the army, then in the navy, and then as an actor in provincial theaters.

It will thus be seen that Southey's kin were not in any sense distinguished people. As gentry, they were very small gentry indeed, rapidly diminishing in importance to the station of farmers and tradespeople. But they were eminently respectable and of the sort who loved respectability. Most important of all, there was on the mother's side a touch of innate ability, to which the poet thought himself indebted for his own powers, and a strong family feeling, which caused his aunt and uncle to provide for the education of the linen-draper's children.

II

Miss Tyler was in Portugal at the time of Southey's birth in 1774, but she returned soon afterwards, rented a house in Bath, and decided to take charge of her nephew's bringing up. She was now thirty-five years old, proud, domineering, eccentric, with a temper rendered more detestable by a consciousness of her own striking beauty. Her youth had been chiefly spent with her uncle, the Rev. Herbert Brad-

/ ford, a curate in Shobden, Herefordshire. He was a man of

wealth and intimate with a Lord Bateman of the neighborhood, with whose wife Miss Tyler became a great favorite. Here she acquired those tastes and manners which became her chief pride and comfort. After the death of her uncle's wife she managed his house for him, and upon his death she inherited a large part of his fortune, much of which, by the time of Southey's birth, had been spent by her in fashionable vanities at watering-places. Consequently she was henceforth compelled more and more closely to retrench her expenditures. Her position and character, not to say her tongue and temper, gave her an easy ascendancy, not only over the linen-draper's young wife, who was thirteen years her junior, but also over other relatives, friends, and servants. The picture of her suggested by Southey's autobiography and by the character of Miss Trewbody in The Doctor^ is by no means an affectionate one.

Among her other acquirements, Miss Tyler included certain "blue-stocking" tastes and aspirations. She had known not a few small literary men of the day, she had had her portrait painted by Gainsborough, and through a friend at Bath, a Miss Palmer, daughter of the owner of the theatres at Bath and Bristol, she was enabled to pose as patroness of the drama, to dine the players, to cultivate an acquaintance with such people as Colman, Sheridan, Cumberland, Holcroft, and Miss Palmer's particular friend, Sophia Lee. Possibly, one suspects, Miss Tyler hoped to establish a little salon in the house which she now took in Bath in 1774. It stood in the center of a walled garden, looking out upon other gardens, the river, and Claverton Hill. The parlor door, upon whose stone steps her small nephew often sat, was bowered with jessamine. The interior, especially the parlor, was fitted up by Miss Tyler at a greater expense than she could afford, and Southey 1 Doctor, 157-160.

gives a curious catalogue of her treasures: a Turkey carpet; a cabinet of ivory, ebony, and tortoise shell that had come down from the great Duke of Marlborough; the portrait of Miss Tyler by Gainsborough with a curtain to preserve it from flies and the sun; a mezzotint of Pope's Eloisa supposed to resemble Miss Tyler, as well as two similar prints from Angelica Kauffman; and finally a great picture of Pombal, the first portrait of an illustrious man with which Southey became familiar.

By the time that her nephew was old enough to observe his elders, Miss Tyler's ruling passion appears to have become hatred of dirt. She commonly wore a ragged bedgown in order to keep her better clothes clean. Her splendid parlor was never opened except for company and dusting; she lived in a kitchen with rough stone floors and a skylight, and she put her servants into a dark basement. If anyone crossed the hearth while her breakfast was preparing, the tea-kettle had to be re-filled. One whom she disliked was ipso facto unclean, and a pup out of which such a person had drunk had to be buried in the garden for six weeks before it could be used again. All this was, of course, vexatious to her servants, whom she intrusted with her confidences and treated now with overindulgence, now with paroxysms of rage. She would send them constantly to the playhouse, but she never forgave them if they married. Somewhat similar were her relations with her friend, Miss Palmer, and with Southey's mother.

"The authority which Miss Tyler had first exerted as an elder sister she never relaxed. My mother was one of the few persons (for a few such there are) who think too humbly of themselves. Her only fault (I verily believe she had no other), was that of yielding submissively to this imperious sister, to the sacrifice of her own inclination and judgment and sense of what was right. She had grown up in awe and admiration of her, as one who moved in a superior rank, and who, with the advantage of a fine form and beautiful person, possessed that also of a superior and cultivated understanding: withal, she loved her with a true sisterly affection which nothing could diminish, clearly as she saw her faults, and severely as at last she suffered by them. But never did I know one person so entirely subjected by another, and never have I regretted anything more deeply than that subjection, which most certainly in its consequences shortened her life."

Under such a person's care most of Southey's childhood between the years of two and six were passed, except for occasional visits to his home or to his grandmother's house at Bedminster. Miss Tyler had bought a copy of Emile to guide her in the education of the boy, but although in some respects she allowed him great freedom, it cannot be said that she followed Rousseau very closely.

"I had many indulgences, but more privations;" he writes, "and those of an injurious kind; want of playmates, want of exercise, never being allowed to do anything in which by possibility I might dirt myself; late hours in company . . .; late hours of rising, which were less painful perhaps, but in other respects worse. My aunt chose that I should sleep with her, and this subjected me to a double evil. She used to have her bed warmed, and during the months that this practice was in season I was always put into Molly's bed first, for fear of an accident from the warming pan, and removed when my aunt went to bed, so that I was regularly wakened out of a sound sleep. This, however, was not half so bad as being obliged to lie tiU nine, and not unfrequently until 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, fancying figures and combinations of form in the curtains, wondering at the motes in the slant sunbeam, and watching the light from the crevices of the window-shutters, till it served me at last by its progressive motion to measure the lapse of time. Thoroughly injudicious as my education under Miss Tyler was, no part of it was so irksome as this."