ABSTRACT
First published in The Examiner, X, 13 April 1817, pp. 236–7. Reprinted in Hunt, Literary, pp. 116–19. Hunt would continue his satire on Southey’s ‘death’ in The Examiner, X, 11 May 1817, pp. 300–3. On Southey, see the comments in Feast of Poets (Vol. 5, pp. 27–81) and Correspondence, II: 176-7. Hunt had lampooned Southey upon his assumption of the position of poet laureate (see The Examiner, VI, 5 August 1813 pp. 513–14, and Vol. 1, pp. 293–5; VI, 26 September 1813, pp. 609–11, and Vol. 1, pp. 296-300). His acceptance of a paid government position signalled for Hunt and his allies not only that Southey – an early supporter of the French Revolution – had changed his political views, but also that he had become a ‘bought’ poet. Hunt had already sought to embarrass Southey by printing his early poetry to provide a contrast to his current views; see, for example, the series, ‘Acanthologia. Specimens of Early Jacobin Poetry’ in The Examiner of 1816 and headnote above, pp. 43, 83. Hunt publishes this piece in the midst of the ‘Wat Tyler’ affair. Southey had written a radical drama of this name in 1794 but had not published it. In 1817 a pirated edition appeared (the manuscript had apparently remained in the hands of a dissenting minister named Winterbottom) and was distributed as a threepenny pamphlet by radical publishers such as Hone; Southey was told that as many as 60,000 copies were in circulation, but this was most likely an exaggeration. Southey sought to reclaim his property by asking for an injunction from chancery, but the Lord Chancellor, Eldon, ruled that ‘a person cannot recover in damages for a work which is in its nature calculated to do an injury to the public’; in other words, exactly because the work had ‘republican’ tendencies, the now conservative Southey could not protect its copyright. On 14 March 1817, William Smith, one of the members of Parliament for Norwich, mentioned the play in a speech in the House of Commons, labelling Southey a ‘renegado’ and contrasting a passage from Wat Tyler with a current Quarterly Review article Southey had written. Southey responded in a letter to The Courier (17 March 1817) where he was supported by Coleridge (18 March 1817). Southey then undertook a longer defence in A Letter to William Smith, Esq., M. P. Hazlitt responded for The Examiner in a savage review (4 May 1817, pp. 284–7; 11 May 1817, pp. 298–300; and 18 May 1817, pp. 315–18). While Hunt continued to admire the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, although distressed by their politics, he found Southey wanting as both poet and polititican: in The Examiner, IX, 4 February 1816, p. 65, Hunt writes, ‘Mr Southey . . . has spoiled a reasonable talent for poetry by wordiness and affectation, and is weak enough to heap with opprobrium men who never went half so far on the other side as he did’.
