Bristol-based printer. Best known for printing the Bristol Mercury.

Anglican clergyman. He held a long series of posts, rising to be Archdeacon of Coventry in 1861, and wrote widely on Church matters and social issues. His first wife, Elizabeth Poole (d. 1853), was the niece of Southey’s old friend from Somerset, Thomas Poole, and was herself a well-known writer on women’s issues, including On Female Improvement (1836).

A poet and scholar who resided in Norwich and was a close friend of William Taylor’s. His collection of Poems (1792) influenced Southey’s own work.

The youngest son of John Seward of Sapey, Worcestershire. Educated at Balliol College, Oxford (matric. 1789, BA 1793). Seward was one of Southey’s closest friends at Oxford, and an important influence on him. An early enthusiast for Pantisocracy, Seward later withdrew from the scheme and felt himself partly to blame for what he described as ‘having contrived to bring [Southey] ... into ... a calamitous & ruinous ... adventure, from which I might at first perhaps have diverted him’. Southey was deeply shocked by Seward’s death from a ‘fever’, and later addressed his elegy ‘To the Dead Friend’ to him. In a letter to James Montgomery, 6 May 1811, Southey recalled him as ‘an admirable man in all things, whose only fault was that he was too humble ... In his company my religious instincts were strengthened ... Sick of the college-chapel & of the church, we tried the meeting house, — & there we were disgusted too. Seward left College, meaning to take orders; — I who had the same destination, became a Deist after he left me’.

Wife of Thomas Smith and a noted collector of autographs and manuscripts.

The last, unexpected, child of Robert and Edith Southey, and their only surviving son, he was always known as ‘Cuthbert’ to his family. He was born on 24 February 1819 and was indulged by his parents and older sisters. He was mainly educated at home. In 1836–1837 he accompanied his father on a lengthy trip to the West Country, and, in 1838, was one of the party on Southey’s final foreign journey, to France. Southey raised the money to send him to Queen’s College, Oxford (1837–1841), but Cuthbert did not display the precocious intellectual talent of his elder brother, Herbert. Cuthbert entered the Church and pursued a solid, if unspectacular, career, including terms as Vicar of Ardleigh 1851–1855, Kingsbury Episcopi 1855–1879, St James’s, Dudley 1879–1885 and Askham 1885–1888. He was married three times: to Christina Maclachlan (1819–1851) in 1842; to Henrietta Nunn (b. 1824) in 1853; and to Justina Davies (b. 1841) in 1871. Cuthbert was deeply opposed to Southey’s marriage to Caroline Bowles and edited one of the rival posthumous versions of Southey’s letters, Life and Correspondence (1849–1850). Cuthbert was embarrassed by many of his father’s views, including his religious unorthodoxy, enthusiasm for wine and virulent condemnation of some public figures. All of these aspects of Southey’s life were suppressed or explained away in Cuthbert’s edition.

Southey’s younger sister.

The eldest brother of Southey’s father, who lived at Taunton, Somerset. His work as a lawyer led to him accumulating a substantial fortune of £100,000. Although he was unmarried, he refused to help either Robert Southey Senior, thus ensuring the latter’s imprisonment for debt in 1792, or his nephews, to whom he left nothing in his Will. Southey visited his uncle in 1802, describing his miserly existence to John May. In 1806, he recorded that his uncle ‘had thanked God upon his death bed that he had cut me off’. Southey retaliated by writing a poem attacking the deceased.

Eldest child of Tom Southey and his wife Sarah. Born 7 March 1811.

Southey’s paternal aunt, also referred to as ‘Aunt Maria’. Whereas Southey was on poor terms with his surviving paternal uncles, John and Thomas, he was on excellent terms with their sister. Mary Southey lived in Taunton, Somerset. After 1803 she provided important links between her nephew and his regional roots, and Southey stayed with her on his visits to the West Country. Mary, like her nephews, suffered from her two brothers’ lack of familial feeling. She was not included in either of their wills, but did eventually manage to obtain some property from the estate of Thomas.

Daughter of Southey’s old Lisbon acquaintance, Richard Sealy (c. 1752–1821). She married Henry Herbert Southey in 1809.

Southey’s father. A failed Bristol linen-draper, he was briefly imprisoned in 1792 ‘for a bill endorsed for a deceitful friend’. His release was secured by Elizabeth Tyler. He died in December 1792, after what his eldest son described as a ‘long’ decline.

Younger brother and at one time the business partner of Southey’s father, Robert Southey Senior. He was the beneficiary of the will of John Southey, to Southey’s envy and dismay, thus becoming a rich man. He spent his later years in Taunton, Somerset. Although unmarried, childless, and wealthy Thomas Southey was on distant terms with his brother Robert’s sons. Thomas Southey’s Will held no surprises — it cut his nephews off without a penny, ‘his last boast being ... that no one of his own name should ever be a shilling the better for him’.

Elder brother of the Shakespeare critic, Edmond Malone (1741–1812; DNB). Sunderlin was an Irish politician, barrister and landowner, who received his title in 1785. Southey got to know Sunderlin and his family well when they visited the Lakes in 1812–1813.

Poet and civil servant. The son of the gentleman farmer and classicist George Taylor. Southey became acquainted with the Taylors in the early 1810s via his brother Tom, who lived near them in County Durham. Taylor joined the Colonial Office in 1824, eventually rising to be senior clerk for the Carribean colonies. He married Theodosia (1818–1891), daughter of the politican Thomas Spring Rice in 1839. Taylor was a successful civil servant, knighted for his service to the Colonial Office in 1869. He managed to combine his job with a literary career. His greatest success was the drama Philip Van Artevelde (1834), which contained a preface critiquing Byron and Shelley. Taylor and Southey were on excellent terms, and the latter encouraged the former’s literary ambitions, writing a favourable review of his Isaac Comnenus (1827). They toured Holland, France and Belgium in 1825 and 1826 and in the 1830s Southey appointed Taylor as his literary executor and official biographer. The family feud that erupted after Southey’s marriage to Caroline Bowles and that escalated after his death, made Taylor’s role impossible and he resigned from the task. Taylor’s Autobiography (1885) includes material on his friendship with Southey.

Political radical, poet and erstwhile friend of Coleridge. Arrested on a charge of treason in 1794, Thelwall became first a farmer at Llyswen, Wales, then a speech therapist, journalist and itinerant lecturer on elocution. He remained a Radical but faded from the forefront of the political scene after the 1790s. Though they came to disagree on politics, Southey retained a good deal of affection for Thelwall.

Pharmaceutical and manufacturing chemist at Liverpool. He was a leading Quaker and corresponded with Southey in 1820–1821 about the latter’s proposed (but unrealised) life of George Fox (1624–1691: DNB), the founder of Quakerism.

Wealthy vintner of Great Queen Street, London, an acquaintance of John Horne Tooke, Joseph Watt, William Godwin, and the Wordsworths. His fame as a conversationalist led to the epithet ‘River’ to describe him. Southey’s correspondence with him does not appear to have survived.

Daughter of the London merchant George Tarbutt. In 1797 she married Thomas Vardon. They had at least three children, including Thomas Vardon (1799–1867; DNB), Librarian of the House of Commons. Her sister, Caroline Forsyth Tarbutt, married Southey’s old Oxford friend George Maule (d. 1851) in 1810.

Head Master of Westminster School 1778–1802 and later Dean of Westminster. A Tory, in 1792 he used a public sermon at St Margaret’s, Westminster, to defend the constitution and the prevailing social order. He published works on the geography and commerce of the classical world.

In the 1790s a critic of the French revolution and its British supporters and an opponent of Gilbert Wakefield. Southey came to know Watson after his move to the Lakes, visiting him at his Calgarth estate in Troutbeck Bridge, Windermere, where he had lived since 1788.

Childhood friend of Southey. A servant of Elizabeth Tyler, Southey’s aunt, and a recruit to Pantisocracy.

Governor-General of Bengal, who returned to England in early 1806. Wellesley’s governorship was marked by a drive to acquire more territory in India. On his return, political controversy soon erupted: James Paull (1770–1808; DNB), Indian trader (1790–1805), accused Wellesley of ruining his trade in Lucknow (Bengal) and undermining the nawab of Oudh’s authority there during the years 1801–1802. This challenge kept Wellesley out of political office until 1809. In that year Wellesley was appointed Ambassador to Spain, and he arrived in Seville in August 1809 to negotiate with the embattled Supreme Central Junta. Here, he found himself once again in the same theatre of military and diplomatic activity as his brother Sir Arthur Wellesley (Duke of Wellington), his main aim being to support his brother’s army in the Peninsula. The Junta’s unwillingness to organise supplies for the British Army while urging a policy of attack led Wellesley (and Southey) to suspect some of the Junta of co-operating with the French. Southey was suspicious of Wellesley’s role in the Cabinet as Foreign Secretary 1809–1812, because he knew Wellesley favoured Catholic Emancipation. Nevertheless, he had some hopes that Wellesley’s appointment as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland 1821–1828 might lead to stern measures to suppress rural disorders.

The second son of William Wilberforce and his wife Barbara. He was educated privately and then at Oriel College, Oxford, becoming a Fellow of the latter in 1826. However, he resigned his Fellowship in 1831 and took up a career in the Church of England, becoming Archdeacon of the East Riding in 1841. He was close to many of the leading figures in the Oxford Movement and converted to Roman Catholicism in 1854. Wilberforce met Southey as a young man during family visits to the Lake District. He later corresponded occasionally with him, particularly over the edition of his father’s letters produced by Wilberforce and his brother Samuel (1805–1873; DNB)