ABSTRACT
Robert Southey (1774–1843), conventionally linked with Wordsworth and Coleridge as the third ‘Lake Poet’, shared their opposition to the slave trade and their intimacy with Thomas Clarkson. Southey, however, was the most tenacious of the three in the anti-slavery cause. Born in the slaving port of Bristol and schooled at Westminster and Oxford, Southey became intimate with Coleridge in 1794 when they made preparations to create an ideal community in North America, including their each marrying sisters from the Fricker family. The ‘pantisocracy’ scheme fell flat, however, and Coleridge came to profoundly regret his marriage. Southey, after a formative visit to Portugal and Spain, began softening his radical views (eventually, like his fellow Lakers, growing quite conservative) and building a happy domestic life in Greta Hall, Keswick (overlooking Derwent Water), where he helped raise Coleridge’s children. Beginning with The Fall of Robespierre, a dramatic poem written with Coleridge (1794), Southey published many works, including epic romances like Thalaba (1801) and Madoc (1805), incisive prose like Letters from England (1807) and the essays for the Quarterly Review, historical and biographical studies like The History of Brazil (1810–19) and the Life of Nelson (1817), balancing a patriotic zeal for England with a global sensibility.
