These developments were not to much impress Robert Southey's family. His uncle, Rev. Hill, who was very much interested in shaping things up for young Southey's future thought Robert should go to the ministry; or, if not that, then he should read for the bar. Hill didn't push too hard and suggested that Robert should take a little time to think about things and suggested he should go to Portugal and spend some time with him, Uncle Hill, at Lisbon. Southey agreed and gave up his ideas of pantisocracy; though he was not to give up his idea of marrying Edith Fricker (1774-1837). Aunt Tyler, incidently, was particularly disturbed over Robert's plans to marry Edith Fricker, whom she thought was but a common girl.

So it was, in 1795, that Southey was off to spend time at Lisbon. But first there was a commitment that he felt bound to honour before he left. On the 14th of November, 1795, in the parish of the Fricker family, St Mary Redcliff, Bristol, Robert Southey secretly married his love, Edith Fricker. (Better than a month earlier, I should note, in the same church, Coleridge married Sarah Fricker. At Coleridge's marriage, Robert Southey was not present as the pair were no longer on speaking terms. Coleridge, it seems, was upset with Southey because Southey had cast aside the ideas of pantisocracy.4 I might add, too, I suppose, having put the pressure on Coleridge to marry, Southey thought it would not do to run off to Portugal without marrying Edith Fricker.) Right after the marriage ceremony, seemingly at the church door, the newly married couple said their goodbyes to one another. Edith was to go and be with the family of a friend while Southey went off to Portugal.5

In September in 1796, after a six month absence, Southey returned to England and to his new wife. He and Edith were to soon set up housekeeping in the Bristol area. In that year there was to be a partial reconciliation with Coleridge particularly with the birth, on September 19th to Sarah Coleridge, the first child, a son, Hartley. Sorrow too was to come that year when his brother-in-law, a young budding poet like Coleridge and Southey, and their close friend, was to suddenly die from a fever leaving behind a young widow (one of the Fricker sisters) and a young child. During the next few years Southey did turn to the study of law, but the law, he was to realize, was not for him. In 1797, a well heeled gentleman (C.W.W.Wynn) was to give Southey a yearly pension of £160, such a gift enabled Southey to devote time to writing and to traveling. In 1800, both Southey and Sara traveled to Portugal to spend time with Rev. Hill. The Southeys were to return to England in June of 1801.

In September of 1803, the Southeys moved to the Lake District, Keswick. (See map.) It would certainly seem that they moved there at the invitation of Mrs. Southey's sister, Sara. As we have seen, Sara had married Coleridge. By 1803, Sara was in need of help. Coleridge was addicted to opium and was proving to be a failure both as a husband and a father. Further, Edith Southey was in need of some consoling, as she had lost her first born but a month before and it must have been thought that a change of scenery would help.6 The Coleridges had moved into this large home at Keswick known as Greta Hall, and had been living there for about three years. Greta Hall was certainly big enough for both families,7 indeed, Greta Hall was big enough for three families: the Coleridges, the Southeys and the Lowells; most of the members of whom were to live together there at Greta Hall for a number of years. As we have seen, the three young friends (Southey, Coleridge and Lowell) had married three of the Fricker sisters. Coleridge was never to spend any great amounts of time there, indeed, in time he was to take up a permanent residence in London; and Lowell, as we have seen, died in 1795. Thus it was that the three sisters and their children were to live at Greta Hall with Southey as the male head of this collective.

De Quincey in his Recollections was to describe Greta Hall and the arrangements, therein. "The house itself -- Greta Hall -- stood upon a little eminence ... overhanging the river Greta. There was nothing remarkable in its internal arrangements: in all respects, it was a very plain, unadorned family dwelling; large enough, by a little contrivance, to accommodate two, or, in some sense, three families, viz., Mr. Southey and his family; Coleridge and his; together with Mrs. Lovell [Lowell], who, when her son was with her, might be said to compose a third." De Quincey then goes on to make reference to the fact that all of the adult women at Greta Hill were sisters; and how, given that they all had children living under the same roof, that among the many amusing jests of Southey's there was the one where he called the hill on which Greta Hall was placed, the aunt hill. "The house had, therefore been divided (not by absolute partition into two distinct apartments, but by an amicable distribution of rooms) between the two families of Coleridge and Southey." The two families might live apart during the day but would meet together at dinner.8

By comparing it to that of Wordsworth's, de Quincey was to write of Southey's library at Greta Hall:

"... the two or three hundred volumes of Wordsworth occupied a little, homely bookcase, fixed into one of two shallow recesses formed on each side of the fireplace by the projection of the chimney in the little sittingroom up stairs. ... I believe Wordsworth rarely resorted to his books ... On the other hand, Southey's collection occupied a separate room, the largest, and every way the most agreeable, in the house; and this room styled, and not ostentatiously (for it really merited that name), the Library. ... The books were chiefly English, Spanish, and Portuguese; well selected, being the great cardinal classics of the three literatures."9

"He [Southey] wrote poetry (as if anybody could) before breakfast; he read during breakfast; he wrote history until dinner; he corrected proofsheets between dinner and tea; he wrote an essay for the Quarterly afterwards, and after supper, by way of relaxation, composed the Doctor, a lengthy and elaborate jest. Now, what can anyone think of such a life, except how clearly it shows that the habits best fitted for communicating information, formed with the best care and daily regulated by the best motives, are exactly the habits which are likely to afford a man the least information to communicate? Southey had no events, no experiences. His wife kept house and allowed him pocket-money ..."11

"Wordsworth lived in the open air: Southey in his library, which Coleridge used to call his wife. Southey had particularly elegant habits (Wordsworth called them finical) in the use of books. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was so negligent, and so self-indulgent in the same case, that, as Southey laughingly expressed it to me some years afterwards, 'to introduce Wordsworth into one's library, is like letting a bear into a tulip garden.'"12

"Crabb Robinson was on cordial personal terms with Southey from the time of their first meeting at Dr. Aikin's house in March 1808, when he was 'charmed by his person and manners.' They did not agree on politics, and Crabb Robinson 'deemed him... an honest' alarmist; they seldom agreed about poetry, except in so far as both admired Wordsworth and Coleridge. But Crabb Robinson and Southey had much in common in their love of travel and their love of letters, and when, at Godwin's house in 1817, in Crabb Robinson's presence, Shelley 'was very abusive towards the laureate,' saying he had 'sold himself to the court,' the diarist is content to state that 'the friends of Southey are under no difficulty in defending him.' It is, by the way, somewhat surprising to find that Crabb Robinson noted in Shelley 'a resemblance to Southey, particularly in his voice.' This seems to have been the only occasion when the two men met, and Crabb Robinson says that Shelley made 'a pleasing impression, which was not altogether destroyed by his conversation, though he is vehement, and arrogant, and intolerant.'"13

"Whatever were the first motives to the war among politicians, they saw that in its spirit, and for its objects, it was a civil war; and as such they pursued it. It is a war between the partisans of the ancient civil, moral and political order of Europe against a sect of fanatical and ambitious atheists which means to change them all. It is not France extending a foreign empire over other nations: it is a sect aiming at universal empire, and beginning with the conquest of France."14

"... the light of the French Revolution beamed into his soul ... while he had this hope, this faith in man left, he cherished it with child-like simplicity, he clung to it with the fondness of a lover. He was an enthusiast, a fanatic, a leveler; he stuck at nothing that he thought would banish all pain and misery from the world; in his impatience of the smallest error or injustice, he would have sacrificed himself and the existing generation (a holocaust) to his devotion to the right cause. But when he once believed after many staggering doubts and painful struggles, that this was no longer possible, when his chimeras and golden dreams of human perfectibility vanished from him, he turned suddenly round, and maintained that 'whatever is, is right.'"15

"He was born an age too late. Had he lived a century or two ago, he would have been a happy as well as blameless character. But the distraction of the time has unsettled him, and the multiplicity of his pretensions have jostled with each other. No man in our day (at least no man of genius) has led so uniformly and entirely the life of a scholar from boyhood to the present hour, devoting himself to learning with the enthusiasm of an early love, with the severity and constancy of a religious vow; and well would it have been for him if he had confined himself to this, and not undertaken to pull down or to patch up the State!'"16

By age 38, Southey had quite given up all of the revolutionary notions that he had possessed as a young man. By then, in 1812, he was "a state pensioner and a champion of the party of order in the Quarterly Review..."19 What Southey, and Wordsworth too, had turned into were supporters of British society, and, certainly it is plain, that British society had become supporters of Southey and Wordsworth. Others poets, Byron for one (and he could well afford to be independent in thought) was of the view that Southey and his ilk were but "dull hirelings," "venomous apostates" and "cold blooded assassins of freedom."20

Any conclusion about Southey's character, as was held by Byron, must be tempered by the fact that Robert Southey was a popular person and had many friends. He was to be admired because of his devotion to his work, his family (much extended) and his country; and, maybe just simply, as Hazlitt was to write, because Southey was an "industrious and calligraphic man."

"The variety and piquancy of his writings form a striking contrast to the mode in which they are produced. He rises early, and writes or reads till bedtime ... Study serves him for business, exercise, recreation. He passes from verse to prose, from history to poetry, from reading to writing, by a stop-watch. He writes a fair hand without blots, sitting upright in his chair, leaves off when he comes to the bottom of the page, and changes the subject for another, as opposite as the Antipodes. His mind is after all rather the recipient and transmitter of knowledge, than the originator of it. He has hardly grasp of thought enough to arrive at any great leading truth. His passions do not amount to more than irritability. With some gall in his pen and coldness in his manner, he has a great deal of kindness in his heart. Rash in his opinions, he is steady in his attachments, and is a man, in many particulars admirable, in all respectable -- his political inconsistency alone excepted!"21

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Notes:

¹ The Southeys were to have nine children, five of whom died young leaving five boys: Robert (the subject of this biographical sketch), Thomas (b.1777), Henry Herbert (b.1783-1865) and Edward.

² Wordsworth didn't think that Southey had quite the right personality to get much out of his university experience; he lacked "the congregating temper that pervades our unripe years." (As quoted by Edward Dowden in his biography on Southey (New York: Harper, nd) at p. 29.)

³ Ibid., p. 35.

⁴ A Bondage of Opium (New York: Stein & Day, 1974) p. 165. As the passing times were to show, Coleridge was less upset with Southey because of the aborted ideas of their youth, but continued to bear a grudge because (so Coleridge thought) Southey had forced Coleridge to marry a girl that he did not love.

⁵ Dowden's biography, op. cit., p. 43; Molly Lefebure's A Bondage of Opium, op. cit., p. 169; and, Maurice H. Fitzgerald's biographical table, xxi-xxviii, Poems of Robert Southey (Oxford University Press, 1909).

⁶ In September of 1802, the Southeys' first child was born, Margaret Edith; she was to die in August of the following year. There were to be others: Edith May (b.1804), Herbert (b.1806-1816), Emma (1808-1809), Bertha (b.1809), Katherine (b.1810), Isabel & Cuthbert (b.1819). (See Dowden's biography, pp. 77,78,94,95,164,167; and the Fitzgerald biographical table, set out at the front of Poems of Robert Southey, op. cit.)

⁷ There is a site on the Web -- http://www.visitcumbria.com/kes/gretahal.htm : 1/15/2007. It gives an interesting blurb on "Greta Hall."

⁸ See De Quincey's Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets (Edinburgh: Adam Black, 1862) pp. 237-40. To be thrown in with the mix of adults and children were dogs. Southey was a lifelong dog lover and had in succession, as Paul Johnson observed, pointers called Rover and Dapper. [The Birth of the Modern -- World Society 1815-1830 (New York: Harper Collins, 1991) p. 718.]

⁹ Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets, op. cit., pp. 237,239.

¹⁰ Southey's writing can be broken down into two chief periods -- "a period during which poetry occupied the higher place and prose the lower, and a period during which this order was reversed." (Dowden's biography, op. cit., p. 187.) Besides his poetry, not much read any more, Southey wrote biographies, including: Nelson, Wesley, Joan of Arc, Cowper; and he wrote histories, including: Brazil, Portugal, Paraguay, Peninsular War, English Navy. Southey was to never leave a letter unanswered for long, with the result that his correspondence now fills volumes.

¹¹ Birrell's essay, "Walter Bagehot," as found in Selected Essays (London: Nelson, 1908) at p. 233.

¹² Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets, op. cit., p. 219.

¹³ The Life and Times of Henry Crabb Robinson (London: Dent, 1935) at pp. 81-2. We can see from Robinson that Southey was of the view that the government was seriously endangered by the writings of Cobbett, and still more by the Examiner (Leigh Hunt). (P.P. Howe's, The Life of William Hazlitt, 1922, (Penguin, 1949) pp. 215.)

¹⁴ From Regicide Peace, as cited by Russell Kirk in his work, Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered (Arlington House, 1967) at pp. 202-3.)

¹⁵ From Hazlitt's essay, Mr. Southey as was contained in The Spirit of the Age.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ In a letters to William Smith, see Mr. Southey's Letter to William Smith.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ "Southey and the Quarterly Review were often spoken of as a single entity." (Dowden, op. cit., p. 156.)

²⁰ Ibid., p. 121.

²¹ Hazlitt's "Mr. Southey."

²² Dowden's biography, pp. 167-8,184; and the Fitzgerald biographical table, set out at the front of Poems of Robert Southey, op. cit.