On the Slant: Robert Southey

The letters of Robert Southey to go online

In his own lifetime Southey was a highly contentious figure: a polemical poet, essayist, biographer and historian, whose youthful support for the French Revolution mutated into reactionary Toryism. An enthusiastic supporter of the radical feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, he once urged Charlotte Brontë against embarking on a literary career. Southey was an antagonist of Lord Byron and Percy Shelley; a direct contemporary and rival of his fellow 'Lake Poets' Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth; and the correspondent of campaigners such as William Wilberforce. A prolific author, his works included a best-selling biography of Nelson and the fairy tale 'The Three Bears'. Yet although Southey was someone contemporaries found it absolutely impossible to ignore, his reputation was eclipsed in the latter half of the nineteenth century and he has only very recently started to attract scholarly attention.

So he deserved to lose some friends, especially over the Charlotte Bronte snub, but he made important contributions that we must recognize.

The real reason I'm posting here is that I wonder if anymore folklore appears in his letters....or even discussion of his Three Bears. Or read SurLaLune's Annotated Goldilocks if you prefer, since she is NOT in Southey's version.

I love the way the internet makes so much information available to us that would be nearly impossible to access otherwise. That was why I started SurLaLune and while many other sources have arisen over the years and I've tried to adapt somewhat to the changes and expansion of sources, I'm proud to be part of the sharing.