As indeed they did: not a single one of the on-lookers afterwards became a public executioner

As indeed they did: not a single one of the on-lookers afterwards became a public executioner.. They may not be around to appreciate it, but these are exciting times for the Romantics. In the past few years Richard Holmes has made a wonderful job of enhancing Coleridge’s reputation, Stephen Gill has rehabilitated Wordsworth’s, and Peter Ackroyd has made us look again at Blake. Soon, two more eagerly awaited studies – Andrew Motion of Keats, Tom Paulin of Hazlitt – will continue the reappraising trend. The major works of these writers, and of Byron and Shelley, look more alive now than they’ve done for some time.

But what of Southey? Any literary historian seeking to revivify him, as Mark Storey tries to in this conscientious biography, is going to have his work cut out. In his lifetime (1774- 1843), Southey was famous, a respected poet, historian, critic, biographer and translator, and a controversial Poet Laureate. But within a year of his death, Wordsworth was reflecting how few people could remember a single line of his. Fewer still today can be aware that he was the first English writer to set down the story of the Three Bears. Even those who recognise him as a friend of Coleridge are unlikely to have read any of the verse, except perhaps the epic “Madoc” or anti-war ballad “After Blenheim”. Uncertainty affects even his name: should it be pronounced like “mouthy”, the word Byron rhymed it with when alluding to Southey’s garrulous manner? Or has it the same vowel-sound as “mother”?
Mother was a word with a special place in Southey’s heart, although as a child he saw his own mother infrequently. Born to a struggling Bristol draper, packed off at two to live with a frightening maiden aunt, then shuttled between various boarding schools and elderly relations, he had a peripatetic childhood At least he survived it, unlike four of his eight siblings.

And he retained the fondest feelings for his mother, with her sweet temper, kindness and “moral magnetism”.At 13, Southey was sent to Westminster, at the expense of an uncle in Lisbon. His schooling there coincided with the French Revolution, which fired him with radical ideas. In the fifth number of the school magazine he helped to found, he wrote a pseudonymous attack on corporal punishment: “Now, since there is but one God, whosoever flog, that is, performeth the will of Satan, committeth an abomination.” Since flogging was then as essential a part of public-school life as Latin and Greek, the head of Westminster wasn’t having this. Southey’s cover duly blown, he was expelled.Rather than proceeding to Christ Church and a career in the C of E, Southey cast himself in the role of rebel and iconoclast, a bearer of the torch of liberty. The fact that he still proceeded smoothly to Balliol did not make him feel any less martyred or self-righteous. He read Tom Paine, deified Robespierre, railed against slavery and the condition of the poor, and became a staunch republican. Coleridge, a close if squabbling friend, declared him “truly a man of perpendicular Virtue – a downright upright Republican!”Even at 20, though, Southey had a more conventional, worldly side: “Let me have 200 a year & the comforts of domestic life & my ambition aspires no further.” For a time the dream of a just society and of cheerful domesticity were joined in Pantisocracy, his attempt, with Coleridge, to persuade a group of like-minded friends to decamp to the banks of the Susquehanna and there build a new Eden.