ABSTRACT

First published in 1998, this volume combines a bio-critical account of Caroline Bowles Southey’s career with a general selection of her works, both poetry and prose, with the latter drawing attention on her remarkable talent as a letter writer. It will appeal to scholars of Romanticism and the Victorian person as well as women’s studies specialists and historians of autobiography.

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Introduction

In the churchyard of St Thomas’s Parish Church at Lymington, Hamp­ shire, stands a small group of stone monuments that appear to be doing their best to burst through the thongs of ivy which enlace them; or perhaps it is the ivy which is preventing their final collapse. They mark the graves of members of the Burrard family, whose men were distin­

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translations. He contributed regularly to the Quarterly Review, sup­ ported an extended family group, and was made Poet Laureate in 1813, although his verse was never as highly regarded as his prose. His ‘Vision of Judgement’, 1821, for example, was famously and devastatingly parodied by Byron. His posthumous reputation has not fared as well as that of his illustrious contemporaries, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley. The simple epitaph of his second wife is significant less for what it divulges of provincial social snobbery than for what it omits of her own unique achievement. Reading ‘gaps’ has long been recognised as a necessary part of the project of recuperating forgotten women writers, and it holds true for their lives as much as for their works. Yet to a large extent Caroline Bowles Southey contributed to her own neglect by her long-standing inability to take herself seriously as a writer, and more particularly as a poet, which was where her gift really lay. William Wordsworth is perhaps the supreme example of the opposite: he looks into his heart and finds -a Poet.3 Even Southey, a far lesser poet than Wordsworth, sanguinely proposed for himself the following epitaph:

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also drawn into the feud. Only the eldest daughter, Edith, married to the Reverend John Wood Wärter (later the editor of Southey’s letters), loved and honoured her stepmother, and before her own early death, supported her husband in his determination to issue a posthumous volume of Caroline’s collected works. So it was that in 1867 The Poetical Works o f Caroline Bowles Southey was published by Blackwood’s publishing house in Edinburgh.5 This edition of her poems, though not ‘complete’, nevertheless runs to about 300 pages including The Birth-day. Though it did not appear until 13 years after her death, the very fact that her work was deemed worthy of a collected edition by a respected publisher is significant, given that so few contemporary women poets were accorded such recognition.6 Yet today, very few people have heard of her; and of these, most have only the most general idea of her as a writer, though they may have heard of her relationship with Robert Southey. At the same time, his reputation has declined so radically over the last 150 years that such a connection is nowadays very likely to be construed as more of an encumbrance to his wife’s posthumous reputation than it was to her living self. While his was still a name to be reckoned with, however, it cast a different kind of shadow over hers, relegating her very much to a secondary position. This is borne out even by the title given to the useful (though not entirely reliable) memoir by a distant relative, Eleanor Oriebar, published in the Cornhill Magazine in 1874 simply as: ‘Robert Southey’s second wife’ (voi. 30, pp. 217-29). Mark Stor ey’s new biography of Southey,7 which appeared as this book was going to press, perpetuates the tradition among Southey specialists of dismissing the writerly aspect of his second wife. Storey does pay more attention to Southey’s relationship with Caroline and its long sub-romantic beginning than earlier biographers. But of her works he makes little more than passing mention: none appear in his bibliog­ raphy. But his emphasis on her devotion to Southey (which was certainly real enough) and his stress on its most breathless and adulatory moments, coupled with his omission of any reference to her robust humour and mischievous acerbity (though these are equally revealed in her pub­ lished correspondence) draws a one-sided and rather bathetic portrait of a woman whom one could hardly imagine capable of producing work of interest to today’s reader. Yet as a writer, her ability to move from prose fiction through verse satire (The Cat's Tail), dramatic monologue (Tales of the Factories) and verse narrative (The Birth-day) to fine lyric poetry, as well as her facility in expressing herself with down-to-earth immediacy and pungent turns of phrase in letters, make her one whose work should have a great deal of appeal for modern readers. Her most remarkable production remains

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her blank-verse autobiographical poem The Birth-day. Possessing a fine ear for metre and for natural speech rhythms, she is one of the very few nineteenth-century poets to master the traditional difficulties of blank verse. One of her poems, ‘The last journey’, first published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, was surely a metrical model for Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade.8 Her ambitious ‘Sea of life’ (p. 42) may also have served as inspiration for his Lotos-Eaters. Some of her most moving short poems are sonnets written during the sad days of her marriage, published in the volume entitled Robin Hood (1847) after the unfinished collabora­ tive poem she had undertaken with her husband in happier times. Although her work has been out of print since 1867 (apart from a 1996 reprint of The Widow's Tale), the reasons for such neglect lie as much with the vagaries of literary bio-gossip as with changes in fashion: her posthumous reputation was more or less subsumed by her persona as ‘Southey’s second wife’. This late marriage holds many stories: about his rapid mental decay, about her fidelity under pressure, about the false rumours of her money-grubbing, about the hostility of his younger children, and about her anguish in isolation. Gossip circulated surpris­ ingly widely in different forms at the time and for a long period after her death, with versions of the story varying according to the sympa­ thies of the tellers. Such stories provide in themselves an interesting sidelight on literary history, giving insight into how it gets made and how much it can be influenced by unsubstantiated rumour. For instance, Henry Crabb Robinson told Sarah Burney of a ‘prohibition’ Caroline had allegedly placed on Kate Southey’s visits to her senile father; Elizabeth Barrett (as she then was) and Mary Russell Mitford exchanged horrified notes on the same allegation, with information gleaned second-hand from John Kenyon. (Neither of these devoted daughters, one suspects, could stomach the thought of a woman who could marry some other daughter’s father: their sympathies lay entirely with Southey’s children.) Of course, these two were not in a position (as Sarah Burney was) to know the long history of friendship uniting the new-found husband and wife.9 Alaric Watts, on the other hand (to whose Literary Souvenir Caroline Bowles had contributed in the late 1820s and early 1830s), in a letter written after her death to W. H. Dixon, stoutly defended her against all imputations that she had behaved less than perfectly in her difficult role as stepmother to Southey’s children, concluding that ‘a more amiable or accomplished woman has not often existed’.10 Walter Savage Landor similarly testified that she was a ‘saint and martyr’ (Dowden, p. xxiii). Yet one of the most damaging rumours circulating around the time of Southey’s death was the one that assumed she had cold-bloodedly married for worldly advantage, in the full knowledge of her husband’s senile decay, a suspicion that first horrified, then

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outraged her. In one of her letters written from Greta Hall she describes ‘a sleek-looking Quaker’ who called on her to ask if it were true “ ‘as the world says” that [she] knew of Southey’s failed mind before the mar­ riage ... these are indignities ... ’.n A number of manuscript documents, particularly letters, survive in scattered locations, although mostly they date from after her marriage. Her views of her new role surface in substantial correspondences with female friends. Why is her work no longer read? I suspect the answer lies in a combination of factors, apart from the immediately obvious one of changing literary fashions. Some would have applied to any writer of the time, some have to do with her gender, and some peculiarly to do with her own unique circumstances. Among the first, the difficulty faced by any author choosing virtual anonymity in consolidating a reputation. Among the second, the difficulty faced by a woman writer in establishing a totally new genre (in this case, poetic autobiography) and having it taken seriously. Among the third, her isolation from the literary world, and lack of any supportive network of literary friends and acquaintances apart from Southey. In addition, the unpopularity she earned most unfairly in certain quarters by gossip surrounding this unfortunate marriage cast a long shadow over her own achievement. And finally, of course, the lack of adequate critical approaches endemic in pre-feminist literary studies resulted in her virtual obliteration from canonical literary histories. The corollary has been the unavailability of any text of her work outside a rare books library. While an understanding of the reasons for the twentieth-century neglect of Caroline Bowles Southey’s works necessarily involves a consid­ eration of certain nuances of gender and class relations in early nineteenth-century England, it also involves an appreciation of the nega­ tive effects of a too-assiduous cultivation of ladylike anonymity. Although the initial impetus toward publication came from an urgent need for money after her mother’s death, she found it hard to justify later, when she was more comfortably situated. In the eighteenth cen­ tury into which she was born there was an unspoken assumption that women writers divided into two kinds: those respectable ladies who wrote only as an amusement, and the immodest or ‘improper’ women who published for profit.12 Certainly Southey himself began by encour­ aging her not to sign her name, possibly thinking with some weariness of his own position as a famous man of letters: T think you are right in withholding your name. There is an advantage in exciting curiosity; and sometimes a comfort in privacy, which one is not sensible of till it is lost’ (February 1822: Dowden, p. 25). Anonymity provided protection not only against the public, but also, quite possibly, against her own family and local connections: ‘[T]he prejudice against female

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authorship was so strong in the circle to which she belonged that she would have shrunk from incurring it’ (Oriebar, p. 222). A further game that Bowles played with herself in order to overcome her inhibitions about publication, was to pretend that her writings were mere ‘trifles’, springing unbidden from a natural facility with language, rhyme and rhythm that she had had since childhood. By the time she had matured enough as a writer to realise the necessity for taking responsibility for her work by signing her name to it, which she did with the publication of The Birth-day, 1836, it was really too late. Soon afterwards, her marriage with its sad consequences abruptly terminated her career when she was in her early fifties. Although Wärter managed to publish her Poetical Works in 1867, they were by no means complete, omitting many of her finest short poems from her 1847 volume Robin Hood (nominally a joint publication) as well as Tales of the Factories and The Caps Tail (both of which are reprinted in full in the present volume). Among wome n poets of her generation, of course, Caroline Bowles Southey was not alone in her paradoxical desire to seek both the sun and the shade; modesty parades itself in many an eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century preface ‘by a Lady’, and fame was a commodity to be both courted and feared, implying as it did, an indecorous notoriety. Like her contemporaries, Felicia Hemans, Mary Russell Mitford and Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the young Caroline Bowles began to show her talents at an early age and, as with them, she too was warmly encour­ aged by her parents. But her gift was not regarded as something she could sell: she always claimed to dislike ‘writing for gain’, and it was only when she feared losing her precious home that she allowed herself to seek publication. It is no wonder that Robert Southey held such an important place in her life, when we consider that he was the first established writer to whom she turned for help when she first sought to publish and that he immediately offered her real encouragement as well as practical aid. So what were the works she had published in her lifetime, conspicu­ ously unmentioned on her tombstone? Five books of verse, two books of prose tales and one miscellany of mixed prose and verse, as well as a number of uncollected poems and stories in periodicals and annuals (see the bibliography, p. 278). In addition, although it would not have occurred to her to include them among her achievements, she wrote a great many lively, witty letters, judging by those that survive. The preservation of a number of her letters in libraries is no doubt a fortu­ nate by-product of the Southey connection rather than an instance of rare foresight on the part of the archivists. Dowden’s selection from the 20-year correspondence between her and Robert Southey, a correspond­ ence which marks the growth of the warm and at times flirtatious

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skill in drawing her out. In any case, despite the inevitable gaps, we are fortunate to have such rich sources of information. The major reason for any rescue attempt, of course, is a belief in the interest the work might hold for the modern reader. Such a belief has informed the rather unusual generic choice of a hybrid mode for the present study: a cross between an anthology and a critical biography. It seemed to me that it might be hard to justify producing a book-length critical study of a writer whose works are not available in print outside major research collections; equally, the bald reprinting of an anthology gathered from her collected prose works and poems might fail to reach new readers who are quite uninformed as to the circumstances of her life. I have divided the present selection from her works chronologically into four sections: early work; middle period (The Cat’s Tail and Tales of the Factories); The Birth-day (in its entirety); last poems. Details of the editions followed are given in the headnotes. Any editorial interven­ tion is minimal, and fully documented. The old-fashioned spelling con­ vention of replacing ‘e’ with an apostrophe (‘whisp’ring’; ‘wat’ry’; etc) has been modernised. It was old-fashioned even at the time, and it is not known whether it was her choice or Blackwood’s. Because I believe her prose writings, although widely popular at the time, are now mainly of historic interest, I have placed only a small selection in an appendix. Interlarding the poetry sections can be found short essays on different aspects of Caroline Bowles Southey’s literary career, beginning with an account of her early life and the growth of her friendship with Robert Southey; an examination of her relationship with her major publisher, William Blackwood & Sons; a contextual analysis of The Birth-day and an overview of her critical reception; an account of her marriage and its aftermath, right up to her death. As with most reclamation projects involving forgotten women writ­ ers, it is only when we are able to see the writing and the life as inextricably intermeshed that we begin to comprehend the wider signifi­ cance of both. The present study draws on the results of research undertaken in libraries in Britain and the United States over a number of years. By touching on the more significant moments from the written records that remain, I hope I can indicate something of that mysterious lifelong process, part shared, part unique: the making of a woman writer.

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Notes

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Early life and friendship with Robert Southey

Caroline Anne Bowles was born near Lymington, Hampshire, on 6 December 1786. This date, over which there has been a good deal of confusion, has been verified from parish records held in the Hampshire County Record Office. She was baptised on 10 January 1787. The

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servants. Caroline would have been five or six at the time. Although Buckland Cottage is more substantial than its modest name implies, it could scarcely have housed such an extended family. Caroline’s mother Anne, daughter of Magdalen Ann and George Burrard, was sister to Lieutenant General Sir Harry Burrard, a kindly man (and a beloved uncle of Caroline) who had made a good career in the army, serving first in the American, then the Napoleonic wars. A career perhaps more lucky than distinguished -his entry in the DNB, for example, indicates that both his generalship and his baronetcy were fairly easily earned, and further, that his final command in Portugal in 1808 was not handled as judiciously as it might have been. Such a view of Sir Harry (well-meaning and honourable, but pig-headed enough to lose an ad­ vantage in battle by sticking to the rule-book) accords with that adopted in the first edition of Southey’s History of the Peninsular War (London: John Murray 3 vols, 1823-32; see voi. 1, 553-65). For the second edition (1828-37), however, Southey succumbed to Caroline’s persua­ sion to soften his judgement of her uncle just a little (see Dowden, p. 134). In 17871 Burrard had been made governor of Calshot Castle, the old watch-tower at the mouth of the Solent opposite the Isle of Wight, where he lived with his family until his death in 1813. His niece Caroline often stayed with them during the summer, as it was not a great dis­ tance from her home at Buckland, and Sir Harry was her ‘Guardian and almost father’ (after her own father’s death; Schonert, p. 211). The Castle itself (still standing) was built in 1539-40 to guard the entrance to Southampton Water, forming part of the chain of coastal defences built by Henry VIII. It is a squat tower of some three stories in height, with a moat around it and living quarters in a separate building on the land side. It stands on the edge of a shingly beach which affords fine summer sea-bathing, although it is unlikely that the young Caroline would have been encouraged to immerse herself, as she was always regarded as a delicate child, despite periods of tomboyishness. Three of her Burrard cousins died young. The first, Paul, was killed while acting as aide-de-camp to Sir John Moore at the battle of Corunna in 1809 aged 18 (Southey wrote a poem to his memory in 1824: see Dowden, p. 60).2 Another, John, a midshipman, drowned in 1809 aged 17. A third, William, died of his wounds at San Sebastian in August 1813 at the age of 19, followed two months later by the death of his father, aged 58. Sir Harry and his family had provided Caroline with her chief access to the social scene of the county; with his death, when she was 26, came an end to the flow of invitations to balls and parties in the neighbouring districts. There were at least two Burrard daughters, much younger than Caroline; Frances Hannah (d. 1849) and her elder sister Laura, of

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whom Caroline was particularly fond. It was Laura (who may have been the subject of the 1831 poem ‘To my little cousin, with her first bonnet’) who was eventually chosen to be her sole executrix. The young Carol ine grew up in a bilingual household with her French-speaking Jersey great-grandmother and grandmother. Caroline was an only child and this strongly marked matriarchal environment must have profoundly affected her sense of self. It is likely that it was a factor in her comparative freedom from sex-consciousness in her writing: iden­ tity does not need to consciously gender itself until confronted by the opposite sex. This early experience stayed freshly in her mind to a remarkable degree. As an adult, she could still vividly recall both her bitter childhood grief when her beloved grandmother died (when Caroline was five, in 1792, only three years after the death of her great-grandmother) and the rapidity with which it was assuaged:

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autobiography would not be unentertaining, but I will take special care not to favour the public with it’ (Dowden, p. 135). We do know, however, from casual references, that she had friends or relatives living in London with whom she spent some time periodically, but she was never particularly drawn to the metropolis on her own account. Her father died when she was 14, and most of the next 16 years -her young womanhood, in effect -was spent at home in the company of her mother, who, like her own mother before her, was a born storyteller. In January 1817 however, her mother died unexpectedly after a brief illness, and Caroline was left alone with only her old nurse for com­ pany. A later poem recalling the happy period before the death of her mother gives a glimpse of her feeling:

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in India, but came to his ‘sister’s’ rescue a year or so after her mother’s death. At that time, Caroline was left in dire financial straits, thanks to the untrustworthiness of a guardian (never named, so probably a rela­ tive; but surely not one of the Burrards). Colonel Bruce, hearing of her plight, insisted on settling an annuity of £150 upon her, which enabled her to retain her home. He remains a shadowy figure, however: perhaps he was her father’s illegitimate son. Caroline does not often refer to him in her correspondence, though as she later confided to Southey, she was enormously grateful for his generosity: he had had to be dissuaded from making her a much larger gift, and she always feared he would send her an elephant or a dromedary from the East, as he had once tried to ship her from Calcutta a ‘splendid white ass of the desert breed ... whose bray may be heard three miles off!’ (Dowden, p. xviii). Southey thought him ‘an excellently good man’ and admired his accounts of his travels: ‘He certainly knows more about Persia than any other European’.4 Her mother was devoted to gardening, so much so that even as an adult, Caroline suffered pangs of guilt when she altered the garden from her mother’s design.

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to be taught by the parson. This was William Gilpin (1724-1804), vicar of Boldre, and author of a series of illustrated picturesque tours (includ­ ing of ‘the Lakes’, 1786) which were later parodied by William Combe in his popular Dr Syntax books.5 According to her account in The Birth-day, Gilpin was a gentle old man who encouraged her drawing as well as her elementary reading and writing skills, while his sister plied her with bread and butter. She must have accomplished a fair amount at drawing lessons, for in later life she painted in both watercolour and oils, and provided illustrations for her own work. Southey said she was a wicked caricaturist; but that skill was only for private consumption. According to Oriebar (1874, p. 221), a number of her early paintings were engraved and circulated as popular prints, with subjects such as ‘A Country Ball’, ‘Packing Up After the Ball’ -Lymington was a gay town in the Napoleonic era. The young Caroline developed a volatile mixture of precocity and ignorance, which exploded for her one day in a way which she de­ scribed quite dramatically, years later, to Anna Bray (November 1841: Rochester). According to her own account, she was treated like a prodigy, encouraged to display her talents for visitors (rather to her annoyance: she ‘liked romping with my father’s dogs better’), but -as she admits -well satisfied with her own importance. One day, however, when she was ‘lovingly coiled up with a huge old water spaniel, my particular friend’, half asleep under the sofa, two gentlemen came in, sat down on the sofa, and began to rejoice in the absence of the ‘troublesome child’, ‘the insufferable nuisance’. One of these gentlemen had been the fore­ most of her flatterers. Although almost bursting with indignation she stayed put: ‘the strength and depth of the feeling cooled and calmed me and seemed to make me old’. In the ensuing crisis of feeling, which she kept from her parents (‘tho’ I loved them and they loved me tenderly -1 had never been encouraged to pour my heart out to them’), she burnt and destroyed all her work, became pale and grave, refused any more to perform, or as she put it, ‘show off’, and became shy of everybody. When the treacherous gentleman returned and tried to take her on his knee, she boxed his ear. ‘It was a fearful spirit -I have often thought since -that thus early indicated itself’ (November 1841: Rochester). And it must indeed have been ‘a fearful spirit’ -in the same sense of awesome rather than timorous -that later drove her not just to take up writing again, but to persist with it after the death of her parents left her on her own.

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Friendship with Robert Southey In 1818, ‘encouraged’, as she later told him, ‘by the knowledge of his kind reception of Hjenry] K[irke] White’s Poems’ (Dowden, p. 50n.), and driven by urgent financial need, Caroline Bowles sent off a letter to the reigning Poet Laureate.6 She asked for his help and advice in seeking a publisher for her long poem, Ellen Fitzarthur, which she enclosed. Written in rhymed tetrameters, a form she later abandoned in favour of the (to her) more natural flow of unrhymed pentameters, and betraying the influence of Scott, it moves from a slow and self-conscious start through five cantos of increasingly assured verse narrative, telling the age-old story of seduction and betrayal, but with a unique emphasis on the power of filial affections. It also shows promise of a gift for natural imagery, though still rather constrained by the adherence to a strict rhyme scheme; as, for example, when the heroine is first able to admit to herself the extent of her loss in exchanging a parent’s undying affec­ tion for the love of a fickle seducer:

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reply was written ‘without the delay of a single post, and with sincere pleasure’ (ibid., p. 5) While warning her that ‘Booksellers are not the most liberal, nor the most amiable, of men -a constant attention to profit and loss is neither wholesome for the heart nor the understand­ ing’ (ibid.), and assuring her that he himself found the poem too painful to like (ibid., p. 6) -he was always to protest against her choice of pathetic or tragic subjects -he offered to recommend it to his publisher, John Murray, if she would revise it a little. Although he was immedi­ ately convinced of her genius, he felt, he said, that she needed more of the precision of thought and language for which women’s education fits them badly (ibid., p. 10). She did revise, with his generously proffered help, but Murray de­ clined to publish, saying that although he liked the poem, only famous names would sell nowadays (Dowden, pp. 13-14). Southey then ad­ vised her to write a poem on a more saleable subject of local interest, such as the New Forest with its rich history and splendid scenery. Evidently, however, she had motives other than immediate sales, for she never took that advice. She wrote in 1820 to another poet, with whom she shared some mutual acquaintances: James Montgomery (1771-1854), who edited the Sheffield Iris for over 30 years. The letter still exists (held in the Beinecke Library at Yale). ‘Nature has bestowed on me’, she wrote, ‘(that which is often mistaken for genius) a strong bias for poetry, and a facility for writing verse, which is also as frequently and as falsely attributed to the same source ... ’. She solicited his help in self-publishing her poem, since Murray had declined it. In the event, whether recommended by Montgomery or Southey it is unknown, Longmans published Ellen Fitzarthur: A Metrical Tale in Five Cantos, in 1820. It was successful enough to be followed by a second edition in 1822. A measure of Southey’s real kindness and fine tact, as well as his genuine interest in and curiosity about the young writer whom he had not yet met, can be taken from two letters he wrote in 1819, one to her, the other to a doctor in Bristol. At this period of her life, Caroline Bowles was virtually an invalid, not expecting to live very long. Physi­ cally tiny, she had been a sickly child, and as a young adult was plagued with the kind of vague but distressing symptoms -severe headache, neuralgia, dizziness -that we now put down largely to the negative effects of constraining cultural conditions for gifted young middle-class women of the period, although in her case, one suspects that a better knowledge of nutrition would have served her well (‘a chop and a glass of sherry’ was her idea of a healthy meal). In May 1819, she had gone to stay with a relation in Bristol in search of health through a change of air and scenery. No doubt she was still suffering depression after the

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widower. The gradual development over 20 years of a unique tone of voice in her letters to this very special friend is best understood by reading the correspondence printed in Dowden’s edition: at once confi­ dent, animated, humorous, warm and from time to time, not a little teasing. By way of illustration, some extracts from her side of their correspondence are set out below. Correspondence Buckland, July 17th, 1822 Here she thanks RS for forwarding a report of W. L. Bowles’s admiration of her Ellen Fitzarthur. It is not clear whether she really believed she was related to William Lisle Bowles (1762-1850), poet and clergyman, whose Fourteen Sonnets of 1789 had greatly appealed to Coleridge and Southey. It is more probable that they were not related. But at this juncture she muses on how different things might have been if W. L. Bowles had owned her as a kinswoman earlier ...

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Buckland, January 22nd, 1829

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Buckland, January 18th, 1831

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Early poems, 1820-30

Note on texts: the extract from edition of 1820. The poems from Solitary Hours are taken from the first edition of 1826. The poems from 1836 edition. Spelling has been modernised. 1. From Ellen Fitzarthur: a Metrical Tale, in Five Cantosy 1820
ByEllen Fitzarthur is taken from the first The Birth-day are taken from the

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Shaping a career: negotiating Blackwood’s

Caroline Anne Bowles, as she then was, can be said to have entered the domain of literary professionalism (a concept she regarded with due suspicion, however) through the Scottish publishing house of Blackwood and Sons. Apart from her two earliest verse volumes,
ByEllen Fitzarthur

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Bow les’s contributions to the magazine were all either anonymous, or signed with an initial, usually ‘C’ or ‘A’. Sometimes she chose another initial and with it, adopted another voice; as for instance, in her June 1824 piece addressed ‘To the author of “The Shepherd’s Calendar’” (voi. 15, pp. 655-8). James Hogg’s Shepherd's Calendar had begun its serialisation in Blackwood's Magazine (voi. 5, April 1819) -the same year that Mary Russell Mitford began to publish Our Village in The Lady's Magazine; it was, like Mitford’s, a series of character sketches based on different aspects of rural life, revolving round the seasonal activities of the shepherd-narrator. Caroline B owles’s letter to its author, although signed Έ ’ to distance itself from her usual contributions, interestingly makes no attempt to conceal her sex. It begins with a burst of appreciation: T am so delighted to meet you again, Mr Hogg, and in your own element ... in ‘The Shepherd’s Calendar’ I see you! I know you! I am with you! I go along with you step by step, over hill and vale, by tarn and by torrent’, and then proceeds confidently to adopt a semi-mocking tone in upbraiding the Shepherd for his unfeeling treatment of his dog, Sirrah:

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changing meanings for the woman writer of this period. Only too late, though, did she realise the extent to which her adoption of such dis­ guises exposed her work to plagiarists. While the Bowles correspondence in the Scottish National Library (catalogued under her married name Southey) contains such a large number of her letters to Blackwood’s, I have only managed to locate one or two from the other side.5 None the less it is often easy to guess what might have been said by Blackwood from Bowles’s responses. Here is an example: ‘My Pegasus is a very wayward palfrey, and will by no means go thro’ his paces at my will and pleasure; I can only say that when I find him in a tractable mood, he shall do his best for Mr B’s review’ (NLS 4007, ff. 236-7). This spirited communication comes from the first of her surviving letters to William Blackwood, senior, dated 30 August 1821. It is evidently not the first letter she wrote to him: that apparently offered a poem which he had accepted.6 Her reference here to her writing gift as both a ‘Pegasus’ and ‘a very wayward palfrey’ is typical of her ‘no-nonsense’ style. She was, after all, despite her diminutive size, a woman of old-fashioned Tory courage, who kept a brace of pistols primed while living as an ‘unprotected’ female during the agricultural riots in her Hampshire district, and who knew how to fire them. There is no false modesty -she knows she possesses a real gift -but nor is there any giving in to the temptation of ‘Mr B’s’ no doubt flattering solicitation to become a contributor on a regular basis -her winged horse will not become anybody’s hack. Even though she began to think of publication because she needed the money after her mother died, she was by this time enjoying her step­ brother’s annuity, and far from allowing herself to be treated as if she were forced to write for a living. She was conscious enough of her own social status to be aware of the gulf dividing the amateur from the professional. In this context, to have been viewed as ‘professional’ would severely have jeopardised her status as a ‘lady’. The same was largely true for upper middle-class male writers of her political colour; Robert Smith Surtees (1805-64), country squire and author of comic-satiric novels including Jorrock’s Jaunts and Jollities (1838) and Mr Sponge's Sporting Tour (1853), felt so strongly the impropriety of a gentleman’s dabbling in fiction that he not only concealed his writings from all who knew him, but he sacked his publisher when his much prized anonymity was carelessly breached in public.7 Sacking one’s publisher, however, was an extravagance few authors could afford. Publishers needed to be treated with circumspection, at the very least. Caroline Bowles, although a lady, had only limited pri­ vate means, and there were several occasions during her writing career when she felt acutely pressed for funds, and in 1833, with the

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threatened loss of her annuity, came close once more to losing her house. As a result of these fluctuating circumstances, her determination to pursue proper payment for her work tended to fluctuate also. The initial alarm over the possible loss of her home had propelled her into publishing the ‘metrical tale’ Ellen Fitzarthur. Its popular success (two editions) was followed quickly by The Widow's Tale in 1822; hence it was with the confidence of an already published author that she wrote to Blackwood of her ‘wayward palfrey’. Her relations with William Blackwood senior soon developed into cordial liking on both sides; although the two never met, they happily swapped health reports (hers was often precarious, but he was to die before he reached 60) and literary gossip to do with the magazine. Her distress at his death in 1834 was real; it shows not only in the letters she wrote about it, but in the stiffness she felt with the sons, Alexander and Robert, and the time it took her to settle in with them. It is not always clear what her financial arrangements with the firm were at any given moment, but a certain pattern emerges. Originally she seems to have been offered the choice between a payment of ten guineas per sheet8 and a parcel of books. Usually she appears to have accepted books in lieu of money for her verse and prose contributions, and Blackwood’s payments-in-kind erred on the side of generosity; he too liked to do the gentlemanly thing. Having parcels of books sent to her home in the country was a godsend to someone as cut off as she was from any major literary centre. But in 1824, when her financial situation was again pressing, she wrote (9 November) asking for the money instead: ‘if [Mr B] is still disposed to accept my literary wares on those terms, which different considerations have of late strongly inclined me to accept’ (NLS 4013, ff. 120-21). We can safely assume that ‘my literary wares’ is emphasised by way of humourously distancing herself from the vul­ gar necessity of mentioning writing in terms of a trade. Money-talk and how it is handled is one of the important keys to distinguishing professionalism from amateurism. Although she defers to William Blackwood’s experience on some matters, she never actually plays the role of helpless female, preferring instead a more aristocratic flourish. For example, on 7 August 1827, she wrote returning a cheque that had been sent to her:

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about her abilities with money matters. As she confided to Southey: ‘I wish there were literary agents to sell for one upon commission. I shall never manage these affairs well, however important to my finances’ (August 1828: Dowden, p. 142). This in connection with negotiations with Alaric Watts and his wife over her contribution solicited for their annuals. Clearly her gentlewoman status is a hindrance rather than a help: ‘He proposes payment, but in such a round-about way, that I cannot tell what to answer, for I cannot value my goods’ (ibid.). This was not always the case. A few years earlier, a miscellany of her verse and prose pieces from ‘M aga’, which was published anonymously in 1826 under the title Solitary Hours, had undergone some strenuous pre-publication negotiations. On 28 April 1825, Bowles wrote with a very conscious exploitation of what I term the ‘discourse of amateur­ ism’: T am afraid you will note me down, in the black book (which I dare say you keep) of obstinate, conceited authors, when I avow myself disinclined to adopt all your suggestions relative to my pro­ posed publication -’. She then agrees to drop one piece, but wants to retain two others:

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Unfortu nately, Murray declined; so did two others, one giving the ex­ pense of the illustrations as the reason. She then had to fall back upon Blackwood, the publisher who knew her, but swore him to secrecy: O ne thing, &c the principal in my account -I had forgotten to state -that I wish (in case of publication) -to keep the strictest incognita -Not “ by the author of E. E etcetera” -for the world -People expect pathetic Poetesses to be “ like Niobe, all tears” ... ’ (NLS 4727 ff. 97-8). Sadly, despite its delightfully sardonic portrait of Anglo-French rela­ tions by way of a mangy tabby and a tomcat, the volume failed after all to cover its costs and what was more unfortunate, became separated over time by the very effectiveness of its pseudonymous ‘cover’, from the rest of its author’s oeuvre. Less than 200 copies were sold -of 1,000 copies printed, only 152 were sold by 1838, compared with 846 of Chapters on Churchyards (see Blackwood’s records of sale, NLS MS 30 302 ff. 576-7). As a result, it is now even harder to find owing precisely to its quirky pseudonym, which has generally led libraries to catalogue it under its title alone (as in the British Library) or under ‘Katzleben’, with no cross-reference to either ‘Bowles’ or ‘Southey’. Probably the major penalty for any author pursuing this line in dilettantish anonymity is the posthumous confusion surrounding her or his actual publications, and hence, reputation. Just as some of Caroline Bowles Southey’s works have almost vanished, she has also been wrongly credited with works by other writers. The New Cambridge Bibliogra­ phy of English Literature , ed. George Watson (1969) bestows on her almost all the indifferent prose writings of one Mrs Amelia Gillespie, continuing an error begun in the previous century:

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towards her, providing all the information she needed. In fact, the generosity with which Blackwood’s usually did behave towards her, was clearly taken by her as no more than her due as a lady, in the spirit of a continuing game of gentlemanly amateurism. Such usage was face­ saving for an author who was never more than moderately successful in a financial sense. What is especially interesting in Bowles’s case, however, is the way she managed to exploit ladylike conventions of politeness intermixed with a more dashing gentlemanliness (or, aristocratic ladyhood?) to get what she wanted. But when questions of money were involved, and at a stage in her career when she had gained some confidence in her reception, this discourse broke down and she resorted to more direct methods, thus denoting, almost despite herself, her own underlying professional­ ism. Yet because her career was cut off in its prime by the disastrous consequences of her marriage, she was never able to build on the base she had finally established for herself. Her literary reputation, too, remained fragmented as a direct result of her early efforts to avoid any construction of herself as ‘author’. By the time she had admitted her mistake, it was too late. But her posthumous reputation can still be redeemed, once the apparent fragmentariness of her output is reassem­ bled into a whole. It is important that her Blackwood’s correspondence be included as a significant part of that whole. Notes

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Occasional poems, 1831-33

1. The C Baroness de Katzleben, authoress of other touching tales and pathetic pieces, 1831
Byafs Tail, Being the History of Childe Merlin. A Tale. By the From the Preface

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A life in verse: The Birth-day, Wordsworth and religion

The publication of The Birth-day in 1836 marked the coming of age of Caroline Bowles as a writer. The title-page not only prints her name authoritatively for the first time, it also gathers in most of her previous works (though not The Cat's Tail or Tales of the Factories) by listing

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sioned intellect apparently burned within her’, which whenever it became ‘conspicuous’ was ‘immediately checked in obedience to the decorum of her sex and age, and her maidenly condition’.3 As Dorothy wrote in 1806 to her friend Lady Beaumont: ‘Do not think that I was ever bold enough to hope to compose verses for the pleasure of grown persons ... I have no command of language, no power of expressing my ideas, and noone was more inept at molding words into regular metre’.4 There is no censorship so effective as self-censorship. Caroline Bowles was saved from the worst of this desire for self-effacement by a number of factors, not the least being that she had no literary brother looking over her shoulder. She also had the confidence that comes with a natural facility for writing verse: the only time she ever found it truly difficult was when she attempted to school herself, at Southey’s persuasion, in the clumsy metre he chose for what was to have been their joint masterpiece, the dramatic epic ‘Robin Hood’. Yet Southey himself, by his own eminence as Laureate and his undisguised admiration for her verse, must have bolstered her against self-doubt. In addition, his more workaday knowledge of Wordsworth the man, no doubt shared with her in conversation, would have helped to demystify the figure of Wordsworth the poet. Her mixed feelings about Wordsworth come through clearly in a letter she wrote in December 1822 to a friend who had just sent her an account of meeting him on his home ground. On the one hand: ‘To ramble amidst Wordsworth’s haunts, accompa­ nied by Wordsworth himself! conducted by the genius of the place! Every crag, and tree and waterfall must have been touched with double magic, redolent with their own natural beauties, and with the Poet’s spirit breathing over all’. On the other:

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Yet her respect for natural landscape and love of the countryside round her home, though very different in its feeling from Wordsworth’s, gave her poetry much more in common with his than with the verse of many of her own female contemporaries, such as Letitia Landon. Romantic love and its tribulations was never her subject, once she left Ellen Fitzarthur behind. Partly on this account, perhaps, Felicia Hemans, herself an admirer of Wordsworth and a champion of the ‘domestic affections’, was the woman poet she most revered.6 Even Hemans, however, never tried her hand at verse autobiography in the way that Bowles (or Wordsworth) did. And it was commonly believed that women should, like Dorothy Wordsworth, be satisfied with reading what men write, rather than aspire to publication themselves. Given the heavy cultural constraints both spoken and unspoken, on women giving voice to themselves, it is extraordinary to think that Caroline Bowles had the temerity not only to write her verse autobiography but to publish it. Furthermore, the evidence we have suggests that Wordsworth knew of it too. It was read ‘with very much pleasure’ in the Wordsworth household in September 1836, soon after is first publication.7 We can be moderately certain that Bowles would have heard of Wordsworth’s autobiographical project either from himself in 1823 or from Southey, who was of course part of the circle in which its compo­ sition was an open secret. However, it is equally certain that she did not know of it when she began writing her own poem well before 1818, when she and Robert Southey began their friendship by correspond­ ence. By 1835, when John Wilson wrote an extensive adulatory essay on Wordsworth for Blackwood’s, his reputation had shot to such a high point that if his, far grander, verse autobiography had already been published, Bowles might well have shrunk from publishing her own. In any event, she took the bull by the horns, and in the summer of 1836, she published it. How was it received? With a good deal of serious attention, much of it favourable. It was not Wordsworth with whom she was compared, but Thomson and Cowper. Yet the Spectator’s unsigned review (1836), voi. 9, pp. 707-8, immediately recognized that ‘The subject of the Birth-day is an intellectual autobiography, the retrospect of a mind’s life’.

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imaginatively construct before the reader’s eyes its vanished visions of childhood. Yet even this highly favourable reading is clothed in billows of flowery gush that smother his subject as effectively as a feather pillow. When Wilson writes: ‘There is an odour, as of violets, while we press the pages to our lips’ he instantly transforms any idea of ‘the childhood of Genius’ into the equivalent of a scented billet-doux, thereby almost ensuring it, sadly, a comparable ephemerality. The Prelude, of course, was published posthumously in 1850, when admonitions to its author were no longer appropriate. Yet although the outline of Wordsworth’s reception history is widely known -his early struggles against adverse criticism, and later crowning with the Laure-ateship -it is worth focusing briefly on some contemporary responses to the publication of his verse autobiography. On its publication in 1850, the Eclectic Review compared it to Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus ‘as the two most interesting and faithful records of the individual experi­ ence of men of genius which exist’, yet: ‘The ‘Prelude’ is the first regular versified autobiography we remember in our language. Passages, in­ deed, and parts of the lives of celebrated men, have been at times represented in verse, but in general a veil of fiction has been dropt over the real facts ... (voi. 28, 1850, p. 551). Similarly, the British Quarterly Review, despite a curious regret that Wordsworth had not chosen to write his autobiography in prose, so as to have been ‘more anecdotic, interesting, and communicative’, nevertheless believed it would stand ‘as a production sui generis in our literature, a memorial... of the early life of a good and highly-gifted man -’ (BQR , voi. 12, 1850, p. 578). Of course, the scale of Wordsworth’s achievement is unquestionably greater than that of Caroline Bowles, and it would be unfair to her work to appear to be courting an equivalent homage for it. At the same time, it is pleasing to note that not all critics had such short memories as this reviewer. The Athenaeum pointed out in its 1854 obituary of Caroline Southey that her poetic autobiography had ‘preceded by several years the publication of [Wordsworth’s]’. However, instead of wishing her poem had been more gossipy and anecdotal, or admiring its frank unveiling of the ‘real facts’ of her life, it praises it instead in the pecu­ liarly sickening style all too familiar to women writers: ‘The Birthday may be ranked among the most graceful and touching efforts of female genius’. This smacks of John Wilson’s ‘smell of violets’. It was Wilson who had published an extended essay on Wordsworth in Blackwood's Magazine in 1835, the year before he devoted a major article to Caroline Bowles and The Birth-day. The excesses of his enthu­ siasm are expressed with an equivalent lack of restraint: ‘This is indeed sacred poetry! ... the only Great Poet who has ever devoted his whole life to Poetry, and poured into it his whole spirit... for the good of his

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fellow-creatures [and] for the glory of his Creator ... \ The overall effect of this homage to Wordsworth, however, is very different; just as picking up a piece of scented notepaper and pressing it to one’s lips is very different from kissing the hem of a saint’s dusty robe. It is also surely significant that Wilson signed this essay with his usual nom de plume, Christopher North, but left his essay on The Birth-day unsigned. Without wishing to devalue Wordsworth’s recognised stature, it is still pertinent to consider the ways in which Bowles’s work challenges and extends our knowledge of female self-writing in that important liminal period (as it has been retrospectively constructed by literary historians) between Romanticism and Victorianism. How does her poem come to terms with a writing ‘self’ -‘the infinite I AM’ of Coleridge’s definition? Women writers of this period most usually masked their autobiographic writing -Charlotte Bronte’s novels are an obvious ex­ ample (although her case illustrates the truism that women’s writing was always liable to be read as autobiographical). In poetry, Bowles’s assumption of an T fully acknowledged as a representation of her earlier, recollected childhood self, is truly ‘sui generis’. When Elizabeth Barrett Browning (EBB) came to write Aurora Leigh in the 1850s (it was published in 1856, two years after Bowles’s death), she may have drawn some courage for her enterprise from her predecessor’s work. She certainly had read it, and discusses it in a letter to Mitford (MRM), where she damns the poet with faint praise (‘she is a female half of Cowper -without his force, variety &c orginality’), while at the same time purporting to defend the poem against her friend’s severer stric­ tures (Mitford had called it ‘meretricious’), suggesting that Mitford, at least, should have liked its ‘sweet rural cheerfulness’ (EBB to MRM* Raymond and Sullivan (eds), 1983, The Letters of EBB to MRM, voi. 2, p. 323, 27 December 1843). Although she ends by claiming that Mrs Southey ‘is no favourite of mine’ (she had earlier commented that she ‘must have one of her own grey tombstones for a heart -without moss or lichen’ [ibid., p. 252, 1 April 1843]), her comments are extensive enough to show that she had read the work with some attention. Of course, EBB’s poem, like Jane Eyre or Villette, aims to distance its Т’ from its author by means of dramatic character construction. But unlike Bronte’s heroines, Aurora is herself represented as a writer, thus in one sense narrowing the gap between the poem’s creator and its heroine in readers’ minds. Yet although Aurora Leigh may be the nearest thing we have to a female writer’s verse-autobiography after Bowles, Browning’s work is yet quite different in style and approach as well as thought and feeling. Bowles’s poem marks an important milestone in the tradition of women’s self-writing. It was written in unrhymed iambic pentameter, or

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blank verse, the traditional form dramatic and epic poetry in England since the sixteenth century. In the 1836 edition (followed here) the poem has three parts of roughly equal length, and runs to more than 160 pages -about 3,000 lines -yet it is much shorter than originally intended. It covers only the period of its author’s childhood, and does not progress beyond early adolescence. Its form was a bold choice for a poem which, even if completed, could not easily have laid claim to epic status, having for its ostensible subject the everyday life of a solitary girl. The verse is handled with considerable ease and fluency, displaying plenty of humour as well as a sharply observant eye, a strong gift for imagery and an almost perfect ear for metre (not as common a talent as is sometimes believed8) that finds its best expression in an easy conver­ sational tone. Its themes have similarities to Wordsworth’s in The Prelude: memory and its functioning; time and its measurement in terms of place; nature and its relation to the speaker; selfhood and its meanings and contradic­ tions. But the differences are equally important. The religious-spiritual element gives to Wordsworth’s poem much of its essential energy; in Bowles’s poem, this element manifests itself in a significantly conflicted way which gives more the effect of a reining-in than an unleashing of energies. Both poems inevitably deal in elegy, but Bowles’s poem is more specifically one of mourning for a lost idyll: her family is all dead, and she is alone. Mourning itself, of course, implies a mix of celebration and lament. In taking its long reckoning backward through a childhood, The Birth-day moves through a series of loosely linked episodes in apparent conformity with what Felicity Nussbaum has characterised as typical of eighteenth-century autobiography: ‘a series of ... moments held to­ gether by the narrative ‘Т’” .9 Yet here, these links matter as much as the episodes, being of the associative kind called forth precisely by the operation of memory as its tropes are utilised to construct a particular idea of subjectivity. And again, as in high Romanticism, this subjectivity is itself the key subject of the poem. Although it can be argued that language can never construct its own subject, that all it can construct is an absence (the ‘self’ it constructs is already gone, even at the time of writing), it still seems to be perfectly valid to conceptualise the search for subjectivity as a subject in its own right, even though the tantalis-ingly glimpsed end-point to such a search -the ‘self’ itself -can never be reached. Similarly, autobiography as a self-history must by its nature always be broken off rather than finished. In Bowles’s case, this is the more obvious because of her initial plan to continue the poem (and it is not clear why this was abandoned). Unless it can be dignified by a tale of subsequent achievement, the story

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o f the thickets in which Princess Hemjunah hibernates in winter: ‘Un­ checked the devastating fury raged’ (see p. 159), with the predictable result that the toad never reappears. Of course we have been taught to believe that a communication with a mountain is sublime; with a toad it is not even beautiful, and can only be comic. Bowles’s relationship to nature is more eighteenth-century than Romantic. Her much loved garden is a domesticated space marked with human associations, and she sees herself as having a special and influen­ tial kinship with animals. She is also closely observant of their individuation. Even when nature beyond the garden is described, as on a day’s fishing trip with her father, it is nature seen rather curiously perhaps for a small girl, through Izaak Walton’s lens. There is no grappling with elemental moorlands here, no snow-covered Alps to scale. Yet when the lives of animals and birds are described, there is evident a real respect for the mystery of their being: her leveret, grown to a hare, unlike Cowper’s in The Task, is allowed to escape to its own life in the woods. The hierarchising of response to nature, pitting our idea of beauty against our idea of ugliness, is to a large extent still with us: mountains are still sublime and toads are still ridiculous. The American psycholo­ gist Carol Gilligan conducted some interesting research a few years ago on a similar kind of hierarchising taking place in perceptions of gender difference in child development analysis.11 Many of her findings have important implications for examining works of literature which deal in some measure with that very theme of ‘child development’, as both The Birthday and The Prelude do. Gilligan shows the extent to which boys’ development in a male-dominant culture is steered through separation (especially from the mother) towards self-definition by means of an ideology that places high value on autonomy; while girls’ development, by contrast, has been seen as tending to lay primary emphasis on self­ definition through relationship. Traditional psychology, Gilligan argues, in making these empirically based observations, has imbued them with implicit value-judgements about the superiority of autonomous func­ tioning over relational functioning. As a result, girls’ development has traditionally been scored at a lower level of human development than boys’. Underlying this work, of course, is a critique of Freud and those psychologists who have normalised and universalised male developmen­ tal patterns as ‘child development’, while devaluing girls’ development as ‘immature development’. This strikes me as of considerable relevance to the historical reception of both of these poems, each of which proffers an adult perspective from which to view that very developmental process which, the poem insists, led to the ‘end product’ who is its speaker. The internal logic of

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both poems, therefore, depends entirely upon our acceptance of the idea of a specific developmental process. As Mary Jacobus has pointed out, ‘the conjunction of education and autobiography is a founding Roman­ tic trope’. And as she further comments, ‘ The Prelude repeats the self-constituting trope which makes Emile an account of how the child becomes father to the man without the help of his mother. Looked at in this way,’ she argues, ‘the lesson of Wordsworthian pedagogy is “how to get hatched without a parent hen’” .12 Strictly speaking, this is not altogether a new observation: it was noted by The Prelude's earliest reviewers that the poem eschews the subject of human relationships, preferring instead to figure the child subject as a being whose develop­ ment hinges on a series of successfully negotiated spiritual transactions with the natural world, resulting, as of course we know, in nothing less than ‘the growth of a poet’s mind’. Whether or not we feel inclined to accept Jacobus’s formulation, it is in any case obvious that Bowles’s poem lays a far greater emphasis on the importance of ‘relational functioning’ (to use Gilligan’s term) than The Prelude ever does. Both poets were charged (posthumously) with self-absorption and egoism as a result of their choice to write autobiography, yet with differing penalties allotted^ne can’t help thinking, according to gender. In 1854, Caroline Bowles Southey’s Athenaeum obituary took the opportunity to throw in some literary criticism, to the effect that the child Caroline’s lack of a same-age companion can explain: ‘the tone of egotism and the minute details of her everyday life ... Even the compan­ ionship of her father ... appears to have encouraged the concentration of her entire feelings on herself and the few associates of her infancy’ (5 August 1854, p. 969). In Wordsworth’s case, on the other hand: '[The Prelude] will stand, we believe (said the British Quarterly Review) as ... a memorial, executed by his own hands, egotistically perhaps, but still truly (and Wordsworth’s very egotism is capable of a reverent interpre­ tation), of the early life of a good and highly-gifted man’. Of what particular ‘reverent interpretation’ is his egotism capable, one might wonder? This is the gender-specific discourse of Poet-as-God. On the whole, though, it can be said that critics of The Prelude have been prepared to come to terms with the idea that autobiography legiti­ mately places its author as central subject, where critics of The Birth­ day have found the idea problematic, thus indicating some cultural taboo at work. Gilligan’s views are pertinent here. In the case of Bowles, a double standard has operated on two levels. Not only does it permit to a male poet what it denies a female, but this denial covers another, which is the denial of the significant affective movement of Bowles’s poem. Those ‘few associates of her childhood’ actually include, besides her father, the rest of her markedly matrilinea! household of mother,

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CAROLINE BOWLES SOUTHEY, 1786-1854

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Marriage and death

In 1825, the year after the death of her last close family member (her old nurse), Caroline Bowles wrote to Robert Southey:

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suspicion of impropriety: ‘Time if it takes away some privileges of youth, gives others in their stead which are not valueless’.2 It is not clear exactly where the couple went for their wedding tour, but it probably included the Isle of Wight. A month after their marriage they stayed with George Burrard, who wrote of the experience years later: ‘He [RS] was then very absent in his mind, straying constantly into a wrong bedchamber instead of his own’.3 By the end of August they were safely installed at Keswick, and never left Greta Hall until Southey died in 1843. During the previous summer of 1838 Southey had made a six-week continental tour with his son Cuthbert, on vacation from Oxford, and one or two old friends. Later reports indicated that he had not seemed well; exceedingly vague and forgetful, and not taking his customary lively interest in either sights or conversations.4 But it would have been difficult to foretell from these signs that he had any malady that would not respond to rest and quiet. This he habitually sought and found at the end of such journeys, staying with his old friend Caroline Bowles in her comfortable house at Buckland, placed conveniently near his disem­ barkation point at Southampton. ‘It has been a resting-place on all my journeys for many years. Here I can be perfectly quiet, can clear off accumulated letters ... also get through some work ... ’ (Wärter, voi. 4, p. 555). Thus he wrote to a friend on 14 October 1838. By 20 October he was writing to his married daughter Edith:

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marrying him I must surrender many luxuries’, forfeiting ‘more than half my small income’8); whether they were outraged at the thought of anyone taking their mother’s place; or whether it was a combination of all of these factors; the result was an appalling situation for all concerned. It was, in essence, a jealous battle over a dying man. Caroline was a woman without direct sympathetic experience of children -she once referred in a letter to a close friend, to being ‘dragged off ... sore against my will to stand godmother to a goblin ... the most horrid little monster you ever saw’.9 She was no doubt extremely tactless in her failure to allow Southey’s children enough private time with their father. She felt herself absolutely isolated, all her own friends and relations living far away in the south of England. Nor did she feel inclined to complain to them about her lot -pride was too strong for that. She did describe her sorrows to the sympa­ thetic ears of Anna Bray and Mary Anne Hughes, however, and the record of these letters is the nearest approach we have to an oral history:

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Or as she wrote more poetically to another correspondent, who was himself old and ailing: ‘The wind often goes down at twilight you know, and the setting sun leaves a long glory’.12 What emerges only fleetingly from her letters is a sense of how Caroline Bowles Southey saw herself at this traumatic time of her life, when most of her outward energies were focused upon her husband. T have in a manner lost my identity in his -caring for little or nothing but that concerns him directly or indirectly’ (Schonert, p. 13). She was plainly outraged at her treatment by Kate and Cuthbert, though thank­ ful for the unfailing support of Dr Southey and his wife, and of Edith May Wärter and her husband. (Edith, she felt, was the one who was really her father’s daughter.) Another crisis arose when Kate hired serv­ ants with experience of management and compulsion in the treatment of insanity, because of Southey’s increasing bouts of violence: Caroline, however, stoutly defended her husband -who by now, had transformed for her from a father-figure to be admired, into a child to be fiercely protected -against the introduction of any coercive measures. Kate Southe y’s side of the story has been preserved in an account she drew up at the instigation of William Wordsworth, as a record of her distresses that she could share with ‘particular friends’. This document evidently enjoyed a wide circulation; Caroline felt obliged, in self-defence, to draw up a counter-statement of her own (now lost). She had never warmed to Wordsworth the man (‘the philosopher’, as she calls him), although she greatly admired his poetry; but his avoidance of his old friend in his affliction, as well as his siding with the family opposi­ tion, did not endear him to her. She took pleasure in quoting to Mrs Hughes (who confided, meddlesomely, that Wordsworth had ‘ineffable vanity’ -‘the clay is not only part of the feet, but at least reaches above the knees’ [Schonert, p. lxxxix]), the views of Southey’s old friend Walter Savage Landor. Landor wrote in distress at hearing of Wordsworth’s avoidance of Southey’s sickbed, and ‘Now I cannot resist the tempta­ tion of giving you an extract from a letter of Landor’s -Talking of the Man who sitteth upon the Mount -he says -“He is a Hybrid between a Sheep & a Wolf -One eye upon a daffodil Sc another upon a Canal share -writing sonnet upon a Turnpike gate -and turning his back upon the House of an old friend in affliction -’” (March 1842: Schonert, p. 165). But collecting barbs about Wordsworth was small consolation for the pain she was going through. Kate had been staying with the Wordsworths at Rydal Mount, and no doubt obsessively recounting her grievances so that Wordsworth ad­ vised her to make a written record. Three major sources of her sense of outrage against Caroline Bowles Southey emerge within the first two pages of the 30-page manuscript. These are: her mother’s sad death, so

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close to the announcement of the new marriage (‘seven months had scarcely passed since we had lost our mother’ -in fact, it was closer to a year); the rapid deterioration in her father’s health over the time he spent at Buckland Cottage with Caroline Bowles during his marriage year: on his return ‘from Buckland’ after his continental trip in 1838, ‘my Aunt Lovell and Betty were shocked at his appearance ... they never saw one so broken down, so aged in the time’; finally, and surely traumatically, when her father returned to Keswick with his new wife, he completely failed to recognise his daughter: ‘My Father did not know me -he asked me to shew him the way to his Study -and twice shortly after his return, he looked me full in the face &c asked me, who I was -’. Consciously or unconsciously, the daughter quite clearly holds the new wife entirely responsible for all of these sad events connected with her father. One can imagine the shock the new Mrs Southey would have received on arrival at Greta Hall at the end of August, 1839, to such a hostile reception. Brought up as an only child in comfortable circumstances, having lived since her mother’s death some 20 years earlier with only herself to please, she was ill-prepared for a situation demanding the utmost tact and patience in dealing with the wounded feelings of a young woman in Kate’s situation. She and Kate both had to adjust as best they could to the increasingly unavoidable reality of Robert Southey’s mental incapacity. At a fairly early stage, Kate con­ fronted her by declaring: ‘the truth is Mrs Southey you have married an old man, &c do not choose to allow i t ... -she replied “ God forgive you for that speech Miss Southey” -(KS). That Kate was right would not have helped matters. Later, Kate reports:

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mistaken the day -’ (KS). The implication, of course, is that Caroline Bowles should have realised for herself how unfitting her marriage to this old man was. Yet she always maintained that he seemed to her to be perfectly normal beforehand -a little absent-minded perhaps, and not in terribly good health, but nothing that rest and care would not mend: she hoped to persuade him against overworking. The angry exchange recounted in these passages, deeply upsetting to both parties, but no doubt quite devastating for the newly married woman, was never after­ wards referred to. Kate records that it was the last time Mrs Southey ever came downstairs to take tea with her. Caroline Southey had already, it seems, tactlessly expressed astonishment at finding the rather dim Aunt Lovell in residence as a fixture (apparently Southey had neglected to mention her presence): ‘Could she not go to the Coleridges under such circumstances -?’ (KS). She had also not hidden her dismay at discovering the true state of the Southey household finances; Southey had been as blandly optimistic in this regard as he was in his idea of his own health (‘Your Father has always kept telling me he could calculate on at least 10 years of health &c strength -’): ‘Mrs Southey expressed much disappointment at the smallness of my Father’s Income -said he had told her he could calculate on upwards of a thousand a year’ (KS). The upshot was, that Mrs Southey’s own dwindling resources were called upon to pay the bills; although Kate, too, seems to have been obliged to withdraw money from her savings for the same purpose. Kate’s most often voiced complaint is not about any neglect of her father by his new wife -far from it; she can never get time alone with him. She felt her own role as housekeeper to her father, only assumed on the day he left for Buckland the previous spring, which was also the day her elder sister Edith married (12 March 1839), had been snatched from her, even though, she reports, T continued my Father’s Housekeeper at Mrs Southey’s request till early in November 1839 -’ (KS). By this time, tensions had magnified to the point where Kate felt her position to be altogether untenable: T gave up the keys’. She claimed she was ‘terrified’ of Mrs Southey’s violent temper, and it certainly does appear as though govern­ ing her anger was not one of Caroline’s strengths. Kate reports that even Mrs Southey’s faithful maid Honour admonished her mistress on one occasion: ‘her own maid said -“Its of no use being in such a passion Ma’am, there’s no harm done” -’ (KS). This was in connection with some carelessness by a manservant in the process of unpacking a ward­ robe full of her things, that had arrived belatedly from Buckland. It was an unbearable situation for everybody, with no way out. It is only by glimpsing the detail of these petty domestic struggles, however, that one is enabled to comprehend what a catastrophic effect the situation had on a number of lives. For example, included in Kate’s ‘Statement’ is

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a deposition signed by Cuthbert, to the effect that he did not raise his hand to strike Mrs Southey after she made his sister cry; she always maintained that he did, and their enmity was sealed from that moment. Nowhere in Kate’s document is there any acknowledgement whatever that the woman her father had married was herself a writer of distinc­ tion. She is not seen through any other eyes than those of a displaced daughter: her independent identity, enjoyed for 50 years, is subsumed in her role of ‘second wife’. On one notable occasion late in 1840, John Murray sent her a copy of the Quarterly Review with a note (NLS 4852, ff. 170-71), because her own work was featured in a review of women poets (‘Modern English poetesses’).13 As a result, however, she felt herself faced with an embarrassing dilemma:

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Nevertheless, her correspondence with Blackwood’s from this period shows that Caroline still saw herself very much in the light of an author. At the time of her marriage she was proposing to prepare for the press a further volume of prose tales as yet uncollected, and to add more poems to the new edition of Solitary Hours. For the first months after her arrival in Keswick she clung tenaciously to these plans. However, as 1840 unfolded, and her husband’s illness worsened, she began to excuse herself on the grounds on her own indisposition and anxiety about his health. But even as late as October of that year, she was still engaged enough with the process of production to be sending corrections for a poem of hers about to be printed in ‘Maga’ -but the poem itself had been written, as she admits, ‘many years ago’ (20 October 1840: NLS 4052, f. 175). In 1841, however, she was looking forward to the re­ printing of a number of her earlier works (Blackwood’s was taking advantage of the Southey name), including Chapters on Churchyards. But she could not manage to proceed with new work: Ί am now so broken in spirit, & so easily discouraged, that not hearing from you -I have left unarranged the collecteana of prose chapters -from Maga -which were to have been published so long ago -’ (6 January 1842: NLS 4062, ff. 182—3). At some point during 1842, Caroline Southey received a letter from Branwell Bronte, enclosing a poem and seeking help with its publication. Perhaps his sister Charlotte, unresentful of Southey’s earlier ‘dose of cooling admonition’ to herself (see Chapter One, note 7 above), had advised him to take this step. The letter itself does not survive, and it is not clear whether it was addressed to Robert Southey as Laureate, or to his wife. In any case, Caroline must have sent an encouraging reply recommending Blackwood’s, for on 6 September 1842 Branwell sent his verses to that publisher with an accompanying letter referring to the ‘kind advice and encouragement of Mrs Southey [which] has alone emboldened me to make this offering’.14 In the spring of this year she herself had written one of her most affecting poems, ‘The young grey head’, about the accidental drowning of a village girl, which she explains to Blackwood, was taken from experience: ‘For many years I put to school the little girl who was the subject of the extraordinary change I have endeavoured to relate poeti­ cally’ (29 December 1842: NLS 4062, ff. 190-91). This ‘extraordinary change’ -the overnight whitening of a young girls hair as a result of extreme trauma (her failure to save her sister’s life), if based, as she asserts, on a true incident, is unfortunately the one aspect of the poem which strikes the reader as entirely fictional. It lends a curiously Gothic ending to an otherwise beautifully restrained and realistic narrative, and in its jarring effect (at least on modern taste), prompts the specula­ tion that it has something to say to us about the poet’s own state of

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mind; her own guilt and helplessness in the face of her beloved partner’s inexorable decline. When he died on 20 March 1843, she was both devastated and relieved: ‘бс I blessed God! -for he had been three days dying’ (March 1843: Rochester). This letter to Anna Bray is splashed with tears; soon after, she had left Greta Hall for ever, ‘since to stay there was denied me -but when shall I cease to be there in spirit tho’ drawn thither by no living tie?’ (May 1843: Rochester). Within a month of Southey’s death she was involved in another painful struggle, this time with his son Cuthbert. She and Cuthbert had never warmed to each other, although there are affectionate messages to him in her letters when he was small: invitations to ride on the back of her St Bernard dog, for example. But as with Kate, their propinquity at Greta Hall under such stressful conditions saw their relationship break down completely. In March 1853 she complained to Mrs Bray of his ‘unaltered malignity’ towards her (Rochester). When her husband died, Caroline claimed, no doubt correctly, that he had wished her to publish his last works: unfortunately, of course, he had been in no position to inscribe that wish into his will. Cuthbert immediately assumed the position of editor to all his father’s unpublished works. Where she had fought with Kate over possession of the remaining life of her husband, she now had to fight Cuthbert for her right to edit the posthumous remains. Hints of the great battle between the two lurk in the Blackwood correspondence of the period. Cuthbert, naturally, was in a much stronger frame for it, and he eventually carried the day. The chief bone of contention, it seems, was the incomplete Life of Dr Bell, friend of Southey’s and noted proponent of mass national education (The Life of the Reverend Andrew Belly 3 vols, 1844) -no doubt in part because it was likely to make money. Caroline had been very involved with the drafting and preparation of the earlier stages of the book, and within a month of Robert’s death was plunged into an argument with Blackwood’s (really, with Cuthbert) over her right to complete it (letter dated 26 April 1843, marked ‘PRIVATE’: NLS 4067, 185-206). She lost, despite having the support of Dr Henry Southey, his brother’s executor, and despite making dark hints to Blackwood about certain passages in Bell’s life that Robert knew about and had planned to treat with delicacy, but that Cuthbert was quite ignorant of (5 June 1843: NLS 4067, ff. 193-4). Cuthbert’s name appears on the second and third volumes; Caroline was only allowed to edit (silently) the first. On returning the proofs she received £50 for which she was extremely thankful (4 August 1843: NLS 4067, ff. 197-8), as she had been left very poorly provided for. ‘If I go before him -the little that I have, falls ... into the power of his children -and I have not even the power of securing my faithful servant from want in her old age -these are some

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of the worldly advantages I have reaped from my union’ (Schonert, p. 96). In truth, she wa s in no state soon after her husband’s death to consider such an extended job of editing and certainly her own prospect of future work suffered enormously by the trauma she had been through: ‘the last three years have done on me the work of twenty’, she wrote to an American admirer, the poet Lydia Sigourney, no doubt never dream­ ing that Sigourney would publish the letter. But in 1844 Sigourney published her little book of sketches based on her (literary lion-hunting) trip to England a year or two previously, and included a poem ‘To Southey’, which begins: T thought to see thee in thy lake-girt home ... ’ and goes on: ‘But, ah! they told me that thy mind withdrew ... ’. This may have been in questionable taste, but printing a private letter with­ out permission was far worse:

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Life of Bell was published, she eagerly awaited her copy, vowing not to read the Preface, written by Cuthbert, as it would no doubt be too distressing. Two days later, she had read it. She was distressed -and wrote back immediately to Blackwood, pointing out where it was wrong, and demanding to know why there was no word of acknowledgement of her contribution? Her indignation found vent thereafter in dismissing it as ‘the Belliad’. But worse was to come: Cuthbert had resolved to publish his father’s life and letters, and was already at work. When these volumes were finally published, she had determined not to read them, and this time she stuck to her plan. It was just as well. The volume covering Robert Southey’s last years (Southey, voi. 6: 1829-43) barely mentions his second wife. A footnote offers the bald informa­ tion: ‘on the 5th of June, my father was united with Miss Bowles at Boldre Church and returned to Keswick with her’ (p. 385). A few other footnotes refer to her in passing as recipient of certain letters, and one or two items of his father’s correspondence refer to the impending marriage. But there is absolutely no reference to the fact that she spent the whole of her married life nursing and caring for his father: there is not even a reference to her presene# at Greta Hall from 1839 to 1843; the volume concludes with an account of his father’s sudden fever, death and burial in Crosthwaite Churchyard. There is no allusion to the fact that ‘Miss Bowles’ was a well-published writer herself at the time of her marriage. Apart from the motivation of their private feud, there must also have been gender prejudice at work. Here we can see the act of erasure, so often deplored by feminist critics, in its very making. In the same letter to (Alexander) Blackwood in which she states her determination not to read Cuthbert’s book on Southey (15 October 1850: NLS 4091, ff. 122-5), she reminds him of his brother Robert’s earlier promise to collect her remaining prose pieces for publication, to be reprinted in sequence with her poetical works. Her plans for these reprints, however, were not pursued with enough consistency or vigour to be realised. Eventually (1852) Caroline’s money worries were re­ lieved by the granting of a pension of £200 by Sir Robert Peel -not, sadly, for her own contribution to English letters, but as the widow of the Laureate. She had leisure to write, but her health was very poor, and the fight had largely gone out of her, although flashes of the old spirit still shine through in her letters. In 1847 she published her own last poems, along with just a few of her husband’s, in a substantial volume which has traditionally been wrongly assumed to encompass more of his work than hers, probably because she dutifully placed his name first on the title-page. She also called the volume Robin Hood, thus high­ lighting their unfinished joint epic of that name, which she included as a fragment.

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account of its bloodthirstiness: ‘The murder glen’ (p. 222 below). She found this ‘deep tragic’ style of writing by far the easiest ‘and by no means the least’, but her husband ‘called it “wicked writing’” , she told Anna Bray; ‘it made me laugh to hear him read and rail at the same time’ (November 1841: Rochester). This grim tale of incestuous adul­ tery, child abuse, wife-bashing and murder was actually one of her most popular works ever, being reprinted many times after its first publica­ tion in Blackwood's in 1836. It is a little curious that she chose to insert this accomplished piece of melodrama in their one joint volume, given his disapproval, and given its subject-matter: a small act of rebellion against his dead presence, perhaps? The volume a lso contains some of her finest short poems, apparently written in 1841 when she found time to reflect while Southey lay ‘in a blessedly tranquil state’ after the bouts of violence:

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z'l·

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Last poems, 1836-47

From Robin Hood: a Fragment. By the late Robert Southey and Caroline Southey. With other fragments and poems by R. S. First published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in October 1836.
By&c C. S., The murder glen

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Prose writings by Caroline Bowles

1. Thoughts on letter writing (extract) First published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, March 1822. Reprinted in Solitary Hours, 1826, pp. 133-47. This version is from This extract forms the finale of a light-hearted essay rehearsing the
ByBlackwood's Magazine.

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Beauty First published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, December 1823: signed ‘A’. Reprinted in Solitary Hours, 1826, pp. 82-95. This is the version followed here. This oddly vitriolic little essay caught the eye of Sara Coleridge, who wrote (but did not publish) a riposte in 1826. O n the disadvantages resulting from the possession of beauty’ is printed as part of an Appen­ dix (The essays of Sara Coleridge’) in Bradford Keyes Mudge (1989), Sara Coleridge} a Victorian Daughter: her Life and Essays, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, pp. 187-200. Mudge believes, wrongly, that the ‘sprightly morceau’ by Caroline Bowles referred to by Coleridge is Chapter 3 of Chapters on Churchyards; the context of her reference makes it quite clear that ‘Beauty’ was the piece.

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Tales of the Factories

One extract from the 85-page summary of documentary evidence per­ taining to conditions of child labour in the factories, that was appended to the initial publication of This extract was printed exactly as follows (ie in an abridged form) in the original Appendix.
ByTales of the Factories (see p. 103 above).

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Car oline Bowles’s earnings

Transcript of the statement of account issued to Caroline Bowles by Blackwood’s in July 1838. NLS MS 30 302, ff. 576-7. panded; double-entry layout has not been reproduced.
ByNote: abbreviated words have been ex­ Statement -Miss Bowles books as at July 1838

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Caroline Bowles Southey a bibliography

1. Manuscript materials Collections of letters at the National Library of Scotland (Blackwood’s archive), Houghton Library, Harvard, Rochester University Library. 2. Collections and selections

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London: Chadwyck-Healey. Reprinted Poole, Dorset and New York: Woodstock Books, 1996. 1826: Solitary Hours, anon. Edinburgh: Blackwood’s. Reprinted 1839, New York 1846, 1847. Reviewed Fraser's Magazine, 20, December 1839. Microfiche version in Victorian Women Writers series, London: Chadwyck-Healey. 1829: Chapters on Churchyards, anon. 2 vols, Edinburgh: Blackwood’s. [Reprinted 1 voi. 1841; New York, 1842. First published in Blackwood's Magazine April 1824 to May 1829.] 1831: The Cat's Tail, Being the History of Childe Merlin: a tale by the Baron ess de Katzleben, illust. George Cruikshank, Edin­ burgh: Blackwood’s. 1833: Tales o f the Factories, anon., Edinburgh: Blackwood’s. Microfiche v ersion in Victorian Women Writers series, Lon­ don: Chadwyck-Healey. 1836: The Birth-day: a Poem in Three Parts, to Which Are Added Occasional Verses , Edinburgh: Blackwood’s. Reprinted New York 1845; London 1849. Reviewed Spectator, 9, 23 July 1836; Athenaeum, 2 July 1836, Blackwood's Magazine 41, March 1837 [John Wilson]. Microfiche version in Victorian Women Writers series, London: Chadwyck-Healey. 1847: Robin Hood: a Fragment, by the late Robert Southey and Caroline Sou they, with other fragments and poems by R. S. and C. S., Edinburgh: Blackwood’s. 4. Contributions to periodicals See (1855) General Index of Blackwood’s Magazine vols 1-50 for list of contributions by ‘C’. 1824: To th e author of The shepherd’s calendar’ [James Hogg], Blackwood's Magazine, 15, June. (By E.) 1835: The seven temptations, by Mary Howitt. Blackwood's Magazine , 37, April [Review.] 1836: Fanny Fairfield (in 3 parts), Blackwood's Magazine, 39, February-April. (By A.) 5. Letters 1881: E. Dowden (ed.), The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles , Dublin: Dublin University Press.

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Works cited

Barker, Juliet (1994), The Brontes, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Blain, V., Clements, P. and Grundy, I. (eds) (1990), The Feminist Com­ Boyle, A. (1966), An Index to the Annuals, Worcester: Andrew Boyle.
Bypanion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present, London: Batsford Academic.

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Mermin, D. (1993), Godiva’s Ride: Women of Letters in England, 1830-1880, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Moers, E. (1976), Literary Women: the Great Writers, Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Mudge, B. K. (1989), Sara Coleridge, a Victorian Daughter: her Life and Essays, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Moir, D. M . (1851), Sketches of the Poetical Literature of the Past Half-century, Edinburgh: Blackwood. Morley, E. J. (1941-42), ‘Sarah Harriet Burney, 1770-1844’, Modern Philology, 39. Nussbaum, F. (1989), The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideol­ ogy in Eighteenth-century England, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. O. E. [Orieba r, E.] (1874), ‘Robert Southey’s second wife’, Cornhill Magazine, 30 (July-December) pp. 217-29. Poovey, M. (1984), The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley; and Jane Austen, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Quarterly Review (1840), ‘Modern English Poetesses’, 66, September. Raymond, M. B. and Sullivan, M. R. (eds) (1983), The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, 1836-1854, 3 vols, Waco, TX: Armstrong Browning Library. Saintsbury, G. (1906-10), A History of English Prosody, 3 vols, London: Macmillan. Schonert, V. L. (ed.) (1957), ‘The Correspondence of Caroline Anne Bowles Southey to Mary Anne Watts Hughes’, typescript PhD disser­ tation, Harvard University. de Selicourt, E. (ed.) (1967-), Letters o f William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sibley, P. (1997) Caroline and Robert: a Laureate's Romance, Newport: Hunnyhill Publications. Sigourney, L. (1844), Pleasant Memories of Pleasant Lands, London: T. Allman. Storey, M. (1997), Robert Southey: a Life, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Southey, C. C. (ed.) (1849-50), The Life and Correspondence of the Late Robert Southey, 6 vols, Edinburgh: Blackwood. Southey, R. (1823-32), History of the Peninsular War9 3 vols, London: John Murray; second edition 1828-37. Wärter, J. W. (ed.) (1977), Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, 4 vols, London: Longman, first published 1856; repr. New York: AMS Press.

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