Robert Southey - Politics

Politics

Although originally a radical supporter of the French Revolution, Southey followed the trajectory of 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 the allegedly revolutionary "rabble" killed and injured by government troops, and opposed Catholic emancipation. 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, however, he was ahead of his time in his views on social reform. He was for example an early critic of the evils which the new factory system brought to early nineteenth-century Britain. He was appalled by the conditions of life in towns like Birmingham and Manchester and especially by the employment of children in factories and was outspoken in his criticism of these things. He sympathised with the pioneering socialist plans of Robert Owen, advocated that the state promote public works in order 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 a selling out for money and respectability.

In 1817 Southey was confronted with the surreptitious publication of a radical play, Wat Tyler, that 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. 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.”

He was often mocked for what were seen as sycophantic odes to the king, most 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 disrespect for Southey's literary talent, and his disdain for what he perceived as Southey's hypocritical turn to conservative politics later in life.

The source of much of the animosity between the two men can be traced back to Byron’s belief that Southey had spread rumours about himself and Percy Shelley being in a "League of Incest" during their time on Lake Geneva in 1816, a claim 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 following the death of George III. While not referring to Byron by name, this was clearly directed at Byron. Byron retaliated with The Vision of Judgment, a brilliant parody of Southey's poem.