Robert Southey's mutations puzzled
his contemporaries: liberals chided him as a political opportunist while
conservatives regarded him suspiciously as an unreliable ally; he himself believed
that he had changed his ideas with respect to means but had always been consistent
about ends. None of these characterizations seem quite satisfactory: Southey wrote
for bread but his political transformation antedated his government connections; he
was a loyal when it mattered but never a party-man; if not always a friend of
liberty he was a consistent hater of tyranny. Competing accounts about the life of
the laureate raised interest in the six-volume life and letters edited by his son
published in 1849-50.
The book changed few minds. The
published letters show Southey consistent in his dislike for Roman Catholicism but
inconsistent in his attitude towards monarchy. The private correspondence indicates
that the laureate's private utterances were consistent with his public statements,
but manifests the same perplexing combinations of loathing and empathy, cultural
bigotry and intellectual curiosity. The inflated self-regard his contemporaries
mocked is very apparent, but also the kindness and humanity that had always made
Southey an amiable character. There was no lack of new information in the
biography, but no new or different narrative to explain these contradictions.
Indeed, the Life and
Correspondence is much more “correspondence” than
“life”; it lacks the design Thomas Moore and John Gibson Lockhart
imparted to their celebrated biographies of Byron and Scott. Cuthbert Southey
(1819-1888), in 1849 an unbeneficed clergyman, was too young to have remembered
many of the events recounted and so leaves his father tell his own story. The
correspondence provides a good record of what Southey was doing and thinking over
the course of his long life, but with the exception of the opening autobiographical
fragment, not much else. We learn much about the week-to-week life of the
professional writer but little about the sources of the opinions he held so
strongly.
Lives and letters were undertaken
with three objects in mind: to commemorate their subject, to set the historical
record straight, and to turn a profit, usually for a family member or close friend.
Southey composed letters with posthumous publication in mind, intending them as a
record of his life and a legacy for his children. Cuthbert Southey leaves the usual
testimonials to the subject's character and writings (like so much else) to Southey
himself. This was honesty of a sort, but not the best way to show his father to
advantage. He makes unobtrusive excisions and suppressions that dampen the poet's
more extreme views though the resulting portrait was still quite recognizable.
With respect to setting the record
straight, Cuthbert Southey did useful things. No previous laureate had been
subjected to the degree of abuse directed at Robert Southey by the Liberal press.
He was usually prudent enough not to respond to such “personality,”
relying on the posthumous publication of his letters for vindication. Cuthbert
Southey is able to demonstrate that his father was not obsessed by Byron, that on
more than one occasion he refused lucrative offers to become a writer-for-hire, and
that he would have nothing to do with those who did, like Theodore Hook and William
Maginn. He prints a list of his father's contributions to the Quarterly
Review and letters indicating that Southey was not only innocent of
vindictive criticism but disapproved of it as practiced by his associates.
In other respects the editor fails
badly. One would not expect Cuthbert Southey to be frank about Coleridge, but it is
awkward that he would suddenly disappear with no word of explanation. That Robert
Southey was supporting three, sometimes four, of the Fricker sisters was hardly
something to be reticent about even if the poet himself makes little of it: if, as
the editor suggests, financial worries literally drove his mother to distraction he
ought to have explained the full extent of her anxieties. It is left to the reader
to infer connections between Southey's unhappy childhood and the extravagant
charity he later displayed to unhappy families and vulnerable young men. It is
clear from the autobiographical fragment that Southey regarded relationships in his
extended family as the mainspring of his life and character, but his biographer
leaves the matter wrapped in the obscurity where it yet remains.
The thoroughgoing lack of
annotation and occasional misdated letters suggest that Cuthbert Southey was unable
or unwilling to do the research required to write a biography. This situation
likely resulted from the third object object of writing lives and letters, which
was to make a profit. In his preface Cuthbert Southey mentions his father's failure
to appoint a literary executor and claims the office as the family's
representative. This is less than candid. The poet had designated Henry Taylor as
his executor and carefully prepared him for the task of writing his life. When the
Southey family quarreled over the legacy (a family tradition it seems) Taylor
resigned and the papers were divided among the surviving children.
The result was two
collections of letters—one edited by Cuthbert Southey and the other by his
brother-in-law John William Warter—and no proper biography. To estimate the
consequences of this one has only to recall the importance of Moore and Lockhart to
Byron and Scott. Southey was their peer, or nearly so, as a letter writer, and in
even more need of a compelling story to make sense of his life and keep his memory
green. How Taylor might have managed this we cannot know, though readers of The
Doctor, or for that matter Southey's own autobiographical fragment, can
imagine narrative possibilities as yet unexplored by Southey biographers.
For all its limitations, the
Life and Correspondence is hardly a complete failure. Cuthbert Southey
had access to the prime correspondence in the letters to Bedford, Coleridge, Scott,
Landor, and Henry Taylor, as well as the autobiographical letters to May—in
addition to what could be gleaned from the already-published correspondence with
Cottle and Taylor of Norwich. The chief gaps, so far as making sense of things was
concerned, were the correspondence with Southey's publishers, Longman and Murray,
and his editors, Gifford and Lockhart. Even so, Cuthbert Southey is able to supply
a richly detailed account of the working life of a nineteenth-century man of
letters. The later volumes, for which he had memories to draw upon, improve
markedly and his own sparse biographical contributions are attractive enough.
In my own editorial labors,
limited to identifying persons and titles, I have particularly benefited from the
research of Kenneth Curry in
New Letters of Robert Southey, 2 vols (1965)
and from the
Collected
Letters of Robert Southey edited by Linda Pratt, Tim Fulford, and
Ian Packer, a monumental work of scholarship that bids fair to put Southey studies
on a new footing. For the first time, readers will have access to accurate texts
representing the full breadth and extent of Southey's correspondence. This will, at
last, render Cuthbert Southey's edition largely obsolete.
Not entirely, for it is important
to examine the life of a writer through various lenses, including those afforded by
the much-abused life-and-letters genre. No scholarly correspondence project can (or
should) strive to present a life as though it were a novel. But there is something
to be said for narrative immersion, and even a second-best life-and-letters volume
can bring a life to life when its letters are as vibrant as those of Robert
Southey. An avid collector and reader of anecdotes and saints' lives, he
appreciated the value of biography even in its less respectable forms.
David Hill Radcliffe