ABSTRACT
John Wood Warter (1806–78) married Robert Southey’s daughter, Edith May (1804–71), in 1834, and in the same year he became vicar of a parish in Sussex. He was an expert in Scandinavian literature, well-read in German theology, and a keen local historian who published several valuable studies of his parish’s history and antiquities. Warter’s greatest contribution to Southey’s reputation was the Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, published six years after Charles Southey’s The Life and Correspondence. These selections are far more revealing than the earlier official life, both about Southey himself and about his friends. Southey emerges as prickly and vindictive; there seems, in particular, to be little or no love lost between him and Wordsworth. While Coleridge is abroad, Southey reports discussing the lack of letters from him with Wordsworth. Where Wordsworth tries at least to be philosophical, Southey gives vent to a lover-like indignation which recovers composure by imagining haughty disdain.
