Author: Southey, Robert
Biography:
SOUTHEY, Robert (1774-1843: ODNB)
His parents were Robert Southey, a linen draper in Bristol, and his wife Margaret Hill. Robert, their second son, was born in Bristol but spent his early years in Bath in the custody of his well-to-do aunt Elizabeth Tyler. A precocious reader and writer, he attended several schools in the West Country, then was expelled from Westminster School in 1792 for an essay against corporal punishment. Nevertheless, he entered Balliol later that year. In 1794 he cast his lot in with Coleridge (q.v.), who shared his radical views and collaborated with him in poetry. He left Oxford, intending to emigrate to America. His father had died a bankrupt in 1792; his aunt cut him off. When the emigration scheme fell through, Southey in 1795 secretly married his fiancée Edith Fricker, a Bristol seamstress whose sister Sara had already married Coleridge. Leaving her temporarily, he went to visit an uncle in Portugal, where in a few months he established the foundation of his expertise in hispanic languages and history, the first fruits of which was Letters . . . [from] Spain and Portugal (1797). As a married man, Southey embarked on a writing career that combined an enormous amount of anonymous reviewing, translating, editing, essay-writing, and commissioned contributions of verse and prose with ambitious original poetry--"an epic from Bob Southey every spring," as his most dangerous literary opponent, Byron, complained. After a few unsettled years and the loss of one child in infancy, in 1802 the Southeys took up the Coleridges' offer of house-sharing at Keswick in the Lake District. Coleridge soon left the country and his wife, so that Southey became the de facto head of both households. Seven more children were born there. The Wordsworths, near neighbours, became close friends. Southey stayed on at Greta Hall in Keswick for the rest of his life, an influential reviewer (especially for the Quarterly), historian, biographer, political commentator, and--from 1813--Poet Laureate. In 1837 he pre-emptively published his complete Poetical Works in ten volumes. After Edith's death in 1837 he married (1839) Caroline Anne Bowles (q.v.), but shortly after began to show signs of the senile dementia that silenced him in his last years. He is buried at Crosthwaite Church in Keswick. (ODNB 8 Oct. 2020; WorldCat)
Other Names:
- R. Southey
- Southey