Writer and publisher of the radical newspaper the Cambridge Intelligencer. In 1799, Flower was sentenced to six months imprisonment and a fine of £100 for a libel against Richard Watson, the Bishop of Llandaff.

The wife of Henry Vassall-Fox, 3rd Baron Holland, and a renowned political and literary hostess. Lady Holland discussed Spain and Portugal with Southey, and welcomed him to Holland House where he used the library.

Stephen Fricker and his second wife Martha Rowles and their six surviving children: Sarah, Mary, Edith, Martha (b. 1777), Eliza (b. 1778) and George (b. 1785). The failure of his business speculations (including the manufacture of sugar pans) contributed to Stephen Fricker’s early death and to a sharp decline in the fortunes of his family. The family home was sold, Mrs Fricker moved into lodgings in Bristol and opened a dame school, and her three eldest daughters became seamstresses, whose clients included Southey’s mother and aunt, Elizabeth Tyler. Southey knew the Frickers from childhood and was ‘partly educated’ with the three eldest girls. The similarity between their situation and his own (Southey’s father was also a bankrupt) was perhaps an important factor in what was to be a lifelong relationship.

Southey’s only brother-in-law. Southey was intermittently successful in gaining him employment, at a bank in Bristol in 1800 and on one of Rickman’s statistical projects in 1804. Though Southey respected George’s good qualities, he was frustrated by his ‘uncommon dullness’, and bemused by his Methodist enthusiasm. He died at Greta Hall after a long illness.

Southey’s sister-in-law. The second surviving child of Stephen Fricker and Martha Rowles. In the early 1790s she worked as an actress in Bath and Bristol theatres. She married Robert Lovell in January 1794, in spite of the disapproval of his family. Their son, also called Robert, was born in 1795. After Lovell’s death in 1796, Southey tried to persuade his family to provide for his widow and child. He was only partially successful. The Lovells gave Robert Lovell Junior the occasional gift (for example, £20 in 1802) and made some contribution to the boy’s early education, but they did not provide consistent, long-term support. As a result, Mary and her son were dependent upon Southey. They lived with or near to the Southeys for the rest of the 1790s and early 1800s and in 1803 accompanied them to their new home, Greta Hall. Mary remained with the Southeys after her son’s apprenticeship to a London printer. She finally moved out when the house was given up after Southey’s death in 1843. She spent her final years living with Kate, Southey’s unmarried daughter, and died on 10 August 1862. She was buried in the Southey grave in Crosthwaite churchyard, on the outskirts of Keswick.

Poet and astrologer. Born in Antigua, son of Nathaniel Gilbert, speaker of the Antiguan House of Assembly. In 1788 he came to England to work as a lawyer, but suffered a mental collapse and was placed in an asylum run by Richard Henderson (1736/7–1792) at Hanham near Bristol. (In an earlier career as a schoolmaster, Henderson had numbered Joseph Cottle among his pupils.) Gilbert was released after a year and went to London, where he worked as an astrologer and maker of magic talismans. In 1795 he went to Bristol, where he became friends with Southey and Coleridge. In 1796 he published The Hurricane: a Theosophical and Western Eclogue. He disappeared in 1798. It was thought he had left Bristol in search of the ‘Gilberti’, an African tribe with whom he believed he had a spiritual affinity. Southey made enquiries after him, but to no effect. Although by 1820 Southey spoke of Gilbert as long dead, he was in fact probably still alive, dying c. 1825.

Daughter of Robert and Mary Harding, of Broxbourne, Hertfordshire and wife of William Gonne, whom she married in 1790. She was the godmother of Edith May Southey and the mother of Henry Herbert Southey’s second wife, Louisa Gonne. Southey greatly admired her.

Second wife of Robert Gooch, whom she married in January 1814. She was the sister of the surgeon Benjamin Travers (1783–1858).

Charles Watkin Williams Wynn’s uncle. First Lord of the Admiralty, 1806–1807.

Educated at Christ’s Hospital with Coleridge and Lamb and later the owner and printer of Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 1803–1844. He also printed Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817). Gutch was an enthusiastic collector of antiquarian books, and major sales from his library occurred in 1810, 1812, 1817 and 1858.

Politician. The son of Moreton Walhouse, he changed his name to Littleton in 1812 in order to comply with the terms of the will of his great uncle Sir Edward Littleton, the bulk of whose estates he inherited. He married Hyacinthe Mary (1789?–1849), the illegitimate daughter of Richard, 1st Marquess Wellesley. He was elected MP for Staffordshire in 1812, and supported Canning and Catholic emancipation. In 1835 he was created Baron Hatherton of Hatherton.

Younger half-brother of Richard Heber, he was ordained in 1807 and gained some reputation as an Anglican theologian and hymn-writer. He was deeply interested in missionary work, was well-read on West and South Asia and was an occasional contributor to the Quarterly Review. In 1823 his friend Wynn obtained for him the post of Bishop of Calcutta and he died in India after a brief, but highly successful, term of office. Southey wrote a poem in memory of Heber for the Life of Reginald Heber (1830).

Lord Chamberlain 1812–1821, and as such, a key figure in the appointment of Southey as Poet Laureate in 1813.

Daughter of Lovelace Bigg-Wither (1741–1813), a Hampshire landowner. She and her sisters were friends of Jane Austen (1775–1817; DNB). In 1808 she married Herbert Hill and the couple had six children.

The only daughter of Herbert Hill and his wife Catherine.

Southey’s cousin, probably the daughter of his mother’s brother Joseph Hill.

See Fox, Elizabeth Vassal (1771–1845)

Radical satirist, journalist and bookseller. He was tried on three successive days, 18–20 December 1817, for blasphemous and seditious libel, but was acquitted after conducting his own defence, speaking for about seven hours on all three days. His The Political House that Jack Built (1819) was one of the most famous and bestselling satires of its day. In this phase of his career Southey regarded Hone with contempt and was anxious to see him jailed or transported. Hone later devoted himself to miscellaneous literature, and his political ideas modified as he became an increasingly devout Christian and an occasional correspondent of Southey’s.

A cousin of the Captain of the Mars, Vice Admiral of England and Commander of the Channel Fleet 1795–1800.

Clergyman. Possibly the son of John Howe of Honiton, Devon. Educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and Balliol College, Oxford. Howe was Rector of Huntspill, Somerset 1804–1823. He was Southey’s tutor at Oxford in 1793–1794.

Anglican clergyman and tutor to various members of the Royal Family from 1777. He became a Canon of Westminster Abbey 1793–1807, a Prebend of St Paul’s in 1807 and Vicar of Uffington in 1816. His wife, Mary Ann Hughes, was also a correspondent of Southey’s.

Builder, owner and co-occupier of Greta Hall. A carrier by trade, Jackson was the model for Wordsworth’s ‘Benjamin the Waggoner’.

The eldest child of David Jardine (1766–1797), Minister of the Trim Street Unitarian Chapel, Bath. Jardine was an undergraduate at the University of Glasgow and Southey helped his education by lending him books. He later pursued a career in the law, becoming a magistrate and a legal historian.

Scottish, Whig lawyer and critic, from 1803 editor of the Edinburgh Review and, as such, Southey’s bête noire for damning reviews of his, Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s poetry (Jeffrey is credited with identifying them as a school or sect of poets; see Edinburgh Review, 1 (October 1802), 63–83). Southey affected indifference but was acutely sensitive to Jeffrey’s reviews. Jeffrey’s reluctance to support war with Napoleonic France also incurred Southey’s wrath, as appears in the notes to Carmen Triumphale (1814), in which Southey enjoys demonstrating how the Edinburgh’s predictions of defeat were erroneous as well as morale-sapping. The two men met in Edinburgh in October 1805, and Southey ever after consoled himself for the printed criticisms by remembering Jeffrey’s diminutive stature.