Robert Southey - Life

Life

Robert Southey was born in Wine Street, Bristol, England, to Robert Southey and Margaret Hill and educated at Westminster School, London, (from which he was expelled for writing a magazine article in The Flagellant condemning flogging) and Balliol College, Oxford. Of his time at Oxford, Southey was later to say "All I learnt was a little swimming... and a little boating."

After experimenting with a writing partnership with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, most notably with the joint composition of The Fall of Robespierre, he published his first collection of poems in 1794. The same year, he, Coleridge and a few others discussed setting up an idealistic community in America ("pantisocracy").

Their wants would be simple and natural; their toil need not be such as the slaves of luxury endure; where possessions were held in common, each would work for all; in their cottages the best books would have a place; literature and science, bathed anew in the invigorating stream of life and nature, could not but rise reanimated and purified. Each young man should take to himself a mild and lovely woman for his wife; it would be her part to prepare their innocent food, and tend their hardy and beautiful race.

Later iterations of the plan moved the commune to Wales, but Southey was later the first of the group to reject the idea as unworkable.

In 1799, both Southey and Coleridge were involved with early experiments with nitrous oxide (laughing gas). Experiments were performed by the Cornish scientist Humphry Davy.

Southey's wife, Edith Fricker, whom he married at St. Mary Redcliffe, Bristol, on 14 November 1795, was the sister of Coleridge's wife, Sara Fricker. The Southeys set up home at Greta Hall, Keswick, in the Lake District, living on a tiny income. Also living at Greta Hall with Southey and supported by him were Sara Coleridge and her three children following their abandonment by Coleridge and the widow of fellow poet Robert Lovell and her son.

In 1808 he became acquainted with Walter Savage Landor, whose early work he had admired, and the two developed mutual admiration of each other's work and became close friends.

In 1808, Southey used the pseudonym Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella to write Letters from England, an account of a tour of the country supposedly from a foreigner's perspective. The book is said to contain a more accurate picture of English ways at the beginning of the nineteenth century than exists anywhere else.

From 1809, Southey contributed to the Quarterly Review, and had become so well known by 1813 that he was appointed Poet Laureate after Walter Scott refused the post.

In 1819, through a mutual friend (John Rickman), Southey met the leading civil engineer Thomas Telford and struck up a strong friendship. From mid-August to 1 October 1819, Southey accompanied Telford on an extensive tour of his engineering projects in the Scottish Highlands, keeping a diary of his observations. This was published in 1929 as Journal of a Tour in Scotland in 1819. He was also a friend of the Dutch poet Willem Bilderdijk, whom he met twice, in 1824 and 1826, at Bilderdijk's home in Leiden.

In 1837, Southey received a letter from Charlotte Brontë, seeking his advice on some of her poems. He wrote back praising her talents, but also discouraging her from writing professionally. He said "Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life...." Years later, Brontë remarked to a friend that the letter was "kind and admirable; a little stringent, but it did me good."

In 1838, Edith died and Southey married Caroline Anne Bowles, also a poet, on June 4, 1839. Southey's mind was giving way when he wrote a last letter to his friend Landor in 1839, but he continued to mention Landor's name when generally incapable of mentioning any one. He died on 23 March 1843 and is buried in the churchyard of Crosthwaite Church, Keswick, where he worshipped for forty years. There is a memorial to him inside the church with an epitaph written by his friend, William Wordsworth.

Many of his poems are still read by British schoolchildren, the best-known being The Inchcape Rock, God's Judgement on a Wicked Bishop, After Blenheim (possibly one of the earliest anti-war poems) and Cataract of Lodore.

As a prolific writer and commentator, Southey introduced or popularised a number of words into the English language. The term 'autobiography', for example, was used by Southey in 1809 in the Quarterly Review in which he predicted an 'epidemical rage for autobiography', which indeed has continued to the present day. Southey is also credited with penning the popular children's nursery rhyme What are Little Boys Made Of? around 1820.