Statistician. Only son of Thomas Rickman, vicar of Newburn, Northumberland. Educated at Guildford Grammar School (1781–1785) and Oxford (matric. Magdalen Hall, 1788, and migrated to Lincoln College, BA 1792). After graduation he joined his father, who had retired to live in Christchurch, Hampshire. Rickman worked as a private tutor and read widely in economics. He edited the Commercial, Agricultural and Manufacturer’s Magazine (until 1801). In 1796 he wrote a private paper in which he argued for the benefits to the nation of a census. George Rose, MP for Christchurch, showed this to the politician Charles Abbot and in March 1801 the latter steered the census bill into law. Rickman was responsible for the first four censuses (1801, 1811, 1821 and 1831) and paved the way for the fifth (1841). In 1801 he became Abbot’s personal secretary whilst the latter was Chief Secretary for Ireland. On Abbot’s election to the post of Speaker of the House of Commons, Rickman became the Speaker’s Secretary. In 1820 he became Clerk Assistant to the Commons with a salary of £2500 per year. He married Susannah Postlethwaite (d. 1836) in 1805. Rickman’s friendship with Southey began at Burton in 1797 and endured for the rest of their lives. Shortly after their first meeting, Southey described him as ‘rough, coarse, well informed on all subjects, believing nothing, jacobinical’. Later in life Rickman became high Tory, anti-Malthusian and anti-semitic. He regularly provided ideas and information (especially statistics) for Southey’s articles in the Quarterly Review and authored the majority of Southey’s April 1818 Quarterly essay on the Poor Laws. Southey and Rickman planned to collaborate on a sequel to the Colloquies (1829) but this was prevented by John Murray’s (1778–1843) financial problems.

Sailor and farmer. Southey’s younger brother and the one to whom he was in the 1790s closest. Tom entered the navy as a midshipman at the age of 12, saw action in several major battles of the French revolutionary wars (including Cape St Vincent and Copenhagen), was captured on one occasion, wounded on several others, and was made a lieutenant as reward for his bravery in the fight between Mars and L’Hercule on 21 April 1798. He was sent to the West Indies station in early 1804, court martialled for insubordination there, but was given a post under a different captain. He was made captain himself in 1811, but never commanded a ship. After he retired from the navy, he tried his hand at farming and as a customs officer. His last posting was at Demerara, British Guiana, and he died on shipboard on the return voyage to England. He married Sarah Castle in 1810 and produced a large family. Tom’s lack of financial stability meant that some of the burden of supporting him fell on his brothers Robert and Henry Herbert Southey. Tom’s knowledge of the navy and seafaring, and his observations of foreign climes, provided important information for many of Southey’s writings, including his poetry and The Life of Nelson (1813). Tom’s only publication was A Chronological History of the West Indies (1827), written with his brother Robert’s encouragement.

Physician. Southey’s younger brother. With the help of his uncle Herbert Hill, Southey provided money for Henry Herbert’s education at Norwich and Edinburgh. His concerns about his younger brother’s lack of application proved — eventually — to be ill-founded, and in later life the two enjoyed a close friendship. Henry graduated MD on 24 June 1806, producing, with Southey’s help, a dissertation on the origins and course of syphilis which suggested an American origin for the disease. Southey also helped Henry’s finances by procuring him reviewing work in the Annual Review. Henry travelled to Portugal in 1807, returning before its conquest by France at end of the year. He married Mary Sealy (1784–1811), the daughter of a wealthy Lisbon merchant, in 1809. In 1815 he married for a second time, his bride being Louisa Gonne. In his later years Henry became a successful London doctor, with premises in Harley Street and an appointment as physician in ordinary to King George IV.

Southey’s maternal uncle. Hill was the product of a second marriage, and after his father’s death was left short of money (even having to ‘pay his own school bills when it was in his power’) and on extremely bad terms with his older half-brother. Hill was educated at Christ Church, Oxford (BA 1772, MA 1774). From 1782–1807, he was chaplain to the British factory at Lisbon. Hill took a paternal interest in his nephews, and helped finance Southey’s education. Hill’s concern about Southey’s refusal to take the path mapped out for him (a path leading to ordination), his relationship with Edith Fricker, and his politics, led him to visit England in 1795. He returned to Portugal with Southey in tow. Oblivious to the fact that his nephew had married Edith the day before their departure, Hill used every opportunity to introduce Southey to more suitable women. Nevertheless, the time Southey spent with his uncle in 1795–1796 greatly strengthened their relationship, which remained close until Hill’s death in 1828. Hill encouraged his nephew’s interests in Spanish and Portuguese history and literature – the History of Brazil and the unfinished History of Portugal were projects prompted by Hill, who supplied books and manuscripts for them. When in 1806, the expected French invasion of Portugal forced Hill to contemplate returning to England, Southey was detailed to go to Hill’s parish of Staunton-on-Wye, Herefordshire and investigate the mismanagement of tithe income. Hill returned to this living in November 1807 and was the incumbent there until 1810, when the Duke of Bedford presented him to a parish in Streatham, near London. In 1808 Hill had married a woman twenty-five years his junior, Catherine Bigg-Wither, a friend of Jane Austen (1775–1817; DNB). The marriage produced six surviving children, all of whom were on good terms with Southey and his family. Hill’s son and namesake, Herbert Hill Junior, married Southey’s daughter Bertha in 1839. Southey dedicated his Colloquies (1829) to his uncle.

Author, painter and close friend of Robert Southey. Born in Congreve, Staffordshire, daughter of Thomas Barker, an ironmaster, and Mary Homfray. Author of A Welsh Story (1798), she moved in literary circles. She met Southey in Portugal in 1800 and subsequently visited the Southeys frequently in Bristol, London and Keswick. She was godmother to Southey’s first child, Margaret (d. 1803). Southey had a high opinion of Mary Barker’s talents and proposed that she should illustrate Madoc (1805). She appears as the ‘Bhow Begum’ in The Doctor (1834–1847). Mary Barker lived at Greta Lodge in Keswick, next to Greta Hall, between 1812 and 1817, becoming a close friend of the Coleridges and Wordsworths, as well as the Southeys, and teaching music to the girls of the families. Financial difficulties forced her to move to Boulogne in 1819 and she never returned to England. Southey met her for the last time on his trip to France in 1825. In 1830 she married a Mr Slade, who was much younger than her and thought to be a ‘mere adventurer’ by her Keswick friends.

Bristolian author, bookseller and publisher. Although Coleridge’s biographer James Dykes Campbell joked ‘I never heard of ... [Cottle’s] having ... any [parents], and think it very doubtful. I should think he was found under a booksellers counter wrapped in Felix Farley’s newspaper’, Joseph was in fact the second child of Robert and Sarah Cottle. He was educated at the school run by Richard Henderson (1736/7–1792) at Hanham, near Bristol. In 1791 he opened a shop as a printseller, stationer, binder and bookseller in Bristol. Cottle abandoned bookselling in 1798 but continued publishing. Between 1791 and 1800, he sold, printed or published 114 works, in congeries with Joseph Johnson, Benjamin Flower, H. D. Symons and others. In 1800 he began to sell his copyrights to the London firm of Longman. A poet and prose writer, his works included: Poems (1795), Malvern Hills (1798; with a prefatory poem by Southey), Alfred (1800), The Fall of Cambria (1808), Early Recollections, Chiefly Relating to the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, During his Long Residence in Bristol (1837) and Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey (1847). Cottle and Southey were introduced by Robert Lovell in 1794. Although not wealthy, Cottle provided generous financial help to Southey throughout the 1790s, even lending him money for his wedding ring. He published Joan of Arc and the majority of Southey’s earliest works, including Poems (1797) and Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal (1797). His professional collaboration with Southey also included contributing poems to the Annual Anthology and co-editing the works of their fellow Bristolian Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770; DNB). What Cottle did not know, was that Southey viewed his poetry with a merriment that verged on contempt. The two men met less frequently after Southey’s move to Keswick in 1803, but maintained their correspondence. Southey’s final tour of the West Country in 1836–1837 included a visit to Cottle in Bristol. After Southey’s death, Cottle was a central figure in the successful campaign to erect a monument to his memory in Bristol cathedral. He recorded his association with Southey for posterity in his controversial Reminiscences (1847), itself a reworking of the equally contentious Early Recollections (1837).

Elder brother of Henry Kirke White. He was called by his second name, 'Neville'. Southey greatly admired him and the two men became regular correspondents. He initially trained as a medical student in London, but then became a hosiery merchant. In the latter capacity he was able to help Southey acquire books and newspapers from South America for his work on the Edinburgh Annual Register (1810–13) and the History of Brazil (1810–19). He then gave up his business, decided to become a clergyman, and in 1820 married Charlotte Sewell (1799–1873), the daughter of Joseph Sewell (1772–1844), a wealthy Norwich solicitor. White obtained a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Cambridge (1829) and became a clergyman in Norfolk, serving as Perpetual Curate of Great Plumstead from 1822, before his father-in-law, as patron, appointed him to the living at Rushall 1828–32. White then moved on to be Rector of Tivetshall 1832–45. His marriage to Charlotte Sewell produced ten children. One of his sons, Herbert Southey White (1830–63; he succeeded his uncle, Thomas Mack, as Vicar of Tunstead 1858–63), married a granddaughter of Southey’s, Edith Frances Warter (1837–63), so uniting the two families. Another son, James Sewell White (1827–1912), a barrister, inherited the Sloley estate in Norfolk from his uncle, James White, but only on condition that he changed his surname to ‘Neville’.

Poet, critic, philosopher and Southey’s brother-in-law. His complex — at times passionate — four-decade relationship with Coleridge had a major impact both on Southey’s life and on his critical posterity. It began in Oxford in summer 1794 when Robert Allen introduced Southey to a visitor from Cambridge — Coleridge. It was a fateful meeting, leading to the failed scheme of Pantisocracy, literary collaboration, and — eventually — mutual disenchantment. As Southey later recorded: ‘that meeting fixed the future fortunes of us both ... Coleridge had at that time thought little of politics, in morals he was as loose ... as men at a university usually are, but he was a Unitarian. my morals were of the sternest Stoicism ... that same feeling which made me a poet kept me pure ... Our meeting was mutually serviceable, — I reformed his life, & he disposed me toward Xtianity’. It was Coleridge who induced Southey to come north and live at Greta Hall in 1803. In 1804 he left Keswick for Malta and Italy for the sake of his health, returning in 1806, after which he separated from his wife, leaving her and his daughter Sara at Greta Hall and taking his sons Hartley and Derwent to be educated at Ambleside, near the Wordsworths, with whom he lived. During 1807 and 1808 he was in London, lecturing and writing for the Courier, which duly puffed Southey’s work. In 1808 he planned, with assistance from Southey, a new journal The Friend, editing this from Grasmere from 1809 to 1810, with Southey’s help as a proofreader. In 1810 he quarrelled with Wordsworth and moved south. His last visit to the Lake District was in 1812. His relationship with Southey, though distant, was never broken and Southey continued to provide for his wife and children.

Physician, author and brother of Anna Letitia Barbauld. In the mid-1790s, Southey and Aikin moved in the same circles in London. Aikin was a regular contributor to periodicals and his review of Joan of Arc appeared in the Analytical Review in 1796. In 1797 Aikin and his son, Arthur Aikin, translated the first volume of Necker’s On the French Revolution. Southey translated the second. In the mid-1790s, Southey (using a variety of pseudonyms) corresponded with Aikin in the latter’s capacity as editor of the Monthly Magazine. In 1807 Southey contributed articles to the new periodical Aikin edited: The Athenæum: a Magazine of Literary and Miscellaneous Information. Southey also contributed to Aikin’s General Biography (1799–1813).

A Keswick resident, MP for Yarmouth (1797–1802) and Taunton (1826–30). An officer in the Wiltshire militia and a convivial host at his home in Keswick and later on Derwent Isle, Derwentwater. Southey was very fond of Peachy’s wife, Emma Frances Charter, for whom he wrote a poetic epitaph when she died in 1809. His third daughter, Emma (February 1808–May 1809), was named after her. Others in the Peachy circle who visited the Lakes were his sister-in-law Elizabeth Charter and her uncle Sir Charles Malet (1752–1815) and his family, and Peachy’s second wife, a widow, Mrs James Henry.

Writer and painter of miniatures. Her poetry was admired by Coleridge, who penned the complimentary ‘To Matilda Betham, from a Stranger’. Betham published Elegies (1797) and Poems (1808); Southey advised her about her poetry and sat to her for his portrait in 1808, as Coleridge also did. In 1809 Betham visited Greta Hall and painted Southey’s wife and children. Owing to the unconventionality of her conduct Betham’s family confined her in an asylum in 1819. Meeting her the following year, Southey declared her ‘perfectly sane in her conversation and manner, tho she has written me the maddest letters I ever saw’.

Wealthy woollen merchant, who was Mayor of Leeds in 1791 and 1804, Justice of the Peace and Deputy Lieutenant for Yorkshire. He retired to Ludlow in 1807 and Southey came to know him in 1808 when Browne and his family spent one of several summers in the Lakes. The two continued to correspond until Browne’s death.

Civil servant and miscellaneous writer. The younger brother of Grosvenor Charles Bedford and named after his father’s patron. He was educated at Westminster School (adm. 1784), where his nickname was ‘the Doctor’ or ‘Dr. Johnson’. He did not attend university and later held a post at the British Museum. Like his older brother, he did not marry. Southey’s friendship with Horace began at school and their correspondence (though occasionally intermittent) lasted until at least 1797. Southey’s relationship with Horace was slightly different from that with Grosvenor Charles Bedford. He treated Horace as a younger brother: encouraging him and worrying about his tendency to laziness. He also fostered the younger man’s literary ambitions. Horace’s poems appeared in the Monthly Magazine (1797) and the Annual Anthology (1799).

Bristol-based surgeon, painter and linguist, originally from Berne, Switzerland. He came to England in the 1790s and studied medicine under John Abernethy (1764–1831; DNB) at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, before settling at Clifton in Bristol. He married Emmeline Edgeworth, a sister of the novelist Maria (1768–1849; DNB). Southey came to know King well when he succeeded Davy in his role at the Pneumatic Institution in 1801. Southey saw much less of King after he moved to Keswick in 1803, but he continued to speak warmly of his personal qualities and medical skill.

Scottish clergyman, the founder and tireless advocate of the ‘Madras’ system of schooling. When a chaplain in India, Bell introduced to the Madras Orphan Asylum the ‘monitorial’ system, wherein brighter children were charged with supervising groups of slower children, and all were motivated by a graduated scale of rewards and punishments. Returning to Britain, Bell promoted the system in a series of publications and attempted to have it instituted by a board of education controlled by the Church of England. From 1807 he engaged in a public dispute with the supporters of Joseph Lancaster, who promoted a version of his system outside Church control. Southey, at Bell’s request, supported his system in an 1811 Quarterly Review article and book, The Origin, Nature and Object of the New System of Education (1812). By 1832, Bell’s National Society for the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Christian Church was responsible for over 12000 schools in Britain and the empire. Bell continued to badger Southey for public support; after his death Southey, as his literary executor, worked on his biography. Completed by Caroline Bowles and Charles Cuthbert Southey, this was published in 1844 as The Life of the Rev. Andrew Bell.

Clergyman and schoolmaster. Son of Nicholas Lightfoot of Moretonhampstead, Devon. Educated at Balliol College, Oxford (matric. 1790, BA 1794). Perpetual curate for Churcheton, Devon from 1795 and Rector of Stockleigh Pomeroy from 1831–1847. Southey met Lightfoot at Balliol and their friendship endured until his death. Southey briefly considered sending his brother Edward Southey to be educated by Lightfoot and in later life stayed with him during visits to the south west of England.

Newspaper proprietor and journalist. Originally a printer, he bought the Morning Post in 1795 and turned it into the leading anti-government newspaper and a very profitable venture. Though he sold the Morning Post in 1803, he retained an interest in the Courier, which he acquired in 1800–1801, though it is disputed how much influence he had over the newspaper’s contents. Stuart employed Southey to write poems for the Morning Post at a guinea a week in 1798–1799, and again in 1801–1803. This ‘laureateship’ was crucial to Southey’s finances. He invited Southey to contribute to the Courier in November 1807 and in that same month included excerpts from Letters from England in the paper (on 17th and 20th). Southey continued to order the Courier as his daily paper and occasionally published poems there, including a sonnet praising Lord Percy for his involvement in the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and a controversial ode (‘Who counsels peace’) attacking British policy towards Bonaparte in 1814.

Art patron, landscape painter, and coal mine owner. He was a friend and patron of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Constable and Scott, inviting them to his estate at Coleorton, Leicestershire. Sir George was an enthusiastic amateur painter and owner of many Italian landscapes. Southey first met Beaumont in the Lakes in 1803 and corresponded with him and his wife.

The ‘swan of Lichfield’– a poet, encouraged in youth by Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802; DNB). Her writings included Poems on Subjects Chiefly Devotional (1760), Elegy on Captain Cook (1780), Monody on Major Andre (1781) and Louisa: A Poetic Novel (1784). Walter Scott edited her Poetical Works for Ballantyne in 1810; her voluminous correspondence was published in 1811. Seward was quick to recognise Southey as a poet to be watched: her 1797 ‘Philippic on a Modern Epic’ condemned the ‘Baneful’ politics of his Joan of Arc, but simultaneously heralded it as the work of ‘sun-born Genius’. She continued to follow Southey’s career with some interest. In 1802 she wrote to the Poetical Register, lauding him as a ‘genuine Poet’, though cautioning the reader against adopting ‘his capricious systems’. She read Madoc shortly after its 1805 publication and published a lengthy defence of it in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1808. When Southey got wind (via a letter sent by Seward to Charles Lloyd) of her high opinion, he wrote to her. This initiated a correspondence that lasted until Seward’s death and that led to their one meeting in Lichfield in summer 1808. Late in life, Southey provided a comic account of the ‘jubilant but appalling solemnity’ of this encounter. However, his attitude to Seward was more ambivalent than this suggests. He was keenly aware of – and attentive to – her place in literary history, noting that she ‘was not so much over-rated at one time, as she has been since unduly depreciated’ (Poetical Works, 10 vols (London, 1837–1838), V, pp. xv–xviii).

Started life in his father’s booksellers’ business, which he inherited and ran 1811–1819. However, he became better known as an industrious writer, editor and compiler, particularly of works on Nonconformist themes, and as owner and editor of the Eclectic Review, 1814–1837. In 1815 he married the poet Joan Elizabeth Thomas (c. 1786–1877) who wrote as ‘Eliza Thomas’. Southey admired the Associate Minstrels (1810), a collection by Conder and his friends, and arranged for some of the contributors’ work to appear in the Edinburgh Annual Register for 1810 (1812), though he was annoyed by the exclusion of Conder’s poem, ‘Reverie’. Subsequently, Conder wrote to Southey for advice about the Eclectic Review and his other publications and the two developed a regular correspondence.

The only child of George and Barbara Seton and a cousin of Agnes (1764–1852; DNB) and Mary (1763–1852; DNB) Berry, friends of Horace Walpole (1717–1797; DNB). In 1807, she married the Revd James Bannister, Rector of Iddesleigh. Her date of death is unknown, but she is said to have been living in Honiton, Devon in 1838. Seton met Southey during his second visit to Portugal in 1800–1801, and corresponded with him until 1810. She was on very good terms with both Southey and his wife.

School friend. The son of William Collins and his wife Sarah Astell of Maize Hill, Greenwich, Kent. Educated at Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford (matric. Jan 1793). Married Jane Forman, by whom he had one son. Died c. 1806. Collins’s biography is difficult to reconstruct as Records of Old Westminsters and Alumni Oxoniensis both confuse him with his son, also named Charles Collins, and give a later date of death. A note, now in the Huntington Library, written by an eponymous descendant confirms that he died young. In 1815, Southey referred to Collins’s widow and in 1828 described him as long dead. Southey met Collins at Westminster and later described him as ‘one of my most intimate school and college friends’. However, by early 1794 their friendship had cooled and they seem to have had no contact with one another after Southey’s departure from Oxford later that year.

Politician. The father of Thomas Davis Lamb. He was married to Elizabeth Davis and lived at Mountsfield Lodge, near Rye. By the mid-eighteenth century the Lamb family had become the dominant force on Rye corporation and wielded great political influence in the borough. Lamb was the government agent in Rye and sat as an MP for the town 1812–1816 and 1819, though (like his son) he is not known to have spoken in the House of Commons. He was Mayor of Rye some 18 times between 1775–1817. Southey twice visited the Lambs home in Rye in 1791 and 1792 and was on excellent terms with Thomas Phillipps Lamb, perhaps seeing him as a surrogate father-figure. Their correspondence lapsed during Southey’s time at Oxford and was briefly renewed in 1798.

Lawyer and historian who lived at Red Lion square near the British Museum and used the manuscripts thus accessible to him to compile a History of the Anglo-Saxons, 4 vols (1799–1805), on which Southey drew in Madoc (1805). A long term friend and correspondent of Southey, in 1817 Turner gave him legal advice over the Wat Tyler piracy.