1376.1. Robert Southey to Richard Duppa [fragment], [c. late 1807]
1376.1. Robert Southey to Richard Duppa [fragment], [c. late 1807] *
No rumour ever reached me of your conversion to the Thirty Nine Articles. [1] Nor if it had should I have given any credit to it I suppose it not impossible that you may find Oxford a better place in point of society than undergraduates find it – For them the society differs only from what they just left at school in the addition of some decorum a few formalities & the advantage of a degree in debauchery.
Notes
* MS: the letter survives only in a partial
transcript in the hand of Henry Crabb Robinson and made by him in ‘July 1858’, Dr Williams’s Library, London, Crabb Robinson
MSS. The letter was possibly amongst the letters from Southey to Duppa that Robinson was given by Duppa’s niece, Mrs Stone, in
January 1844, see Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley, 3 vols (London, 1938),
II, p. 640.
Unpublished.
Dating note: dated ‘1810’ by Robinson, but this is clearly in error as the content suggests
this was written shortly after Duppa announced his intention of studying at Oxford. He matriculated at Trinity College, Oxford
on 9 November 1807 and this letter probably dates from about that time. BACK
