Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 69, No. 425, March, 1851

This odd amusement, it seems, was not monopolised by young Southey's school. "Oh, I remember it well!" cried my enraptured auditor. "Yes, conqueror was the word. But Southey is wrong! It was the empty shell only that we used. How distinctly I remember it! – and it must be thirty years ago – and never once till this moment have I thought of it since. How strange a thing is memory! You hold the shell, you see, between your forefinger and thumb, the forefinger being bent to receive it. Your adversary did the like with his shell. Then you applied the boss of your little shield to the boss of his – quite fairly, you understand, boss to boss, otherwise the strongest part of one shell would come in contact with the weaker part of the other. Silently, but with all your might, you pressed them together. The one which broke through its antagonist's was, of course, the conqueror. But Southey is wrong! It was only the empty shell we used. Consider, if the animal was there – what a horrible mess!"

We ventured to suggest to our friend, as soon as his impetuosity permitted us, that Southey was describing his school, and no other school whatever; and as to the horrible mess which boys might delight in, it would be difficult to say, in such a matter, what would pass the bounds of credibility.

After this unintentional experiment, we gave up all idea of determining what might or might not be interesting amongst details of such a description. If this story of the snail-shells found its ardent admirer or sympathiser, what other could possibly be pronounced to be superfluous? or down the margin of what other passage could our critical and expurgatorial pencil have safely strayed? To as little purpose, we apprehend, should we undertake to examine such stories on the grave historic ground of their perfect credibility. When "Uncle William," who is half an idiot, plays a trick upon the servant Thomas, and substitutes a dead mouse for his quid of tobacco, the thought did occur to us, that although a mouse is a very small animal, it would surely make an enormous quid – altogether a most extraordinary substitute for a quid – and that the servant Thomas must have been the greatest idiot of the two to have been deceived by it. But such carping criticism, we repeat, would be altogether out of place; and this fragment of autobiography is really too amusing to excite any other feeling than that of regret at its sudden termination.

We learn from it that Southey was born on the 12th August 1774. His father was a linendraper at Bristol, and by no means prosperous in his calling. He passed his childhood, however, for the most part under the roof of a maiden aunt, Miss Tyler, who resided at Bath. To this house at Bath we must, therefore, betake ourselves, if we would learn the circumstances which assisted in forming the mind of the future poet and historian. To be born the son of a linendraper we hold to be no evil; but to have been bred up in the shop at Bristol would have been to Southey a real calamity. From this he was spared. The linendraper's shop may figure on his shield, if the malicious herald is disposed to place it there; it had nothing to do with his head, or his heart, or his manners; he was bred a gentleman. Moreover, he had exactly that sort of breeding which is calculated to foster the imagination, and develop whatever there was of poetry within him. Miss Tyler had two passions – one for order and cleanliness, the other for the theatre. She had, too, a free admission; and young Southey, at an age when other little boys are fain to content themselves with turning over the leaves of the great picture-book, was seated, night after night, in the front row of the boxes, a delighted spectator of the performances of one of the best companies in England. His first library – and this he possessed as soon as he could read – was a whole set, more than twenty in number, "of Mr Newbury's fairy tales, or other wonderful stories; delectable histories in sixpenny books for children, splendidly bound in flowered and gilt Dutch paper, of former days." This library, and free admission to the theatre, and, for the rest, much idleness, few companions, and a world of dreams, – such is the opening scene of Southey's mental history.

"I had seen more plays before I was seven years old," he says, "than I have seen since I was twenty." Miss Tyler, it seems, was living at one time with some ladies whose property was vested in the theatre. From their house —

"A covered passage led to the play-house, and they very rarely missed a night's performance. I was too old to be put to bed before the performance began, and it was better that I should be taken than left with the servants; therefore I was always of the party; and it is impossible to describe the thorough delight which I received from this habitual indulgence. No after-enjoyment could equal or approach it; I was sensible of no defects either in the dramas or in the representation; better acting, indeed, could nowhere have been found: Mrs Siddons was the heroine; Dimond and Murray would have done credit to any stage; and among the comic actors were Edwin and Blanchard – and Blisset, who, though never known to a London audience, was, of all comic actors whom I have seen, the most perfect. But I was happily insensible to that difference between good and bad acting, which in riper years takes off so much from the pleasure of dramatic representation; everything answered the height of my expectations and desires. And I saw it in perfect comfort, in a small theatre, from the front row of a box, not too far from the centre. The Bath theatre was said to be the most comfortable in England; and no expense was spared in the scenery and decorations." – (Vol. i. p. 71.)

Frequenting the theatre soon introduced him to far other literature than Mr Newbury's publications. Shakespere was in his hands, he says, as soon as he could read. He went through Beaumont and Fletcher before he was eight years old. What hosts of plays beside he may have devoured, it was probably beyond his power to recall. And he early began to imitate what he read. In one passage he leaves us to gather that his first attempts at poetry were so early, that they went beyond the time of memory.

Miss Tyler had all along intended to give her protegé a systematic education, and for this purpose she had purchased a translation of Rousseau's Emilius. The systematic education, however, was never commenced. In 1782 he was placed – for what reason we are not told – as a day-boarder in a school at Bristol. He then necessarily resided with his father. Two years after, Miss Tyler herself removed to Bristol, and again received her nephew. But in this interval of two years, the holidays were always spent with his aunt, wherever she might be. It was in these holidays that his real education was carried on.

At home he was on very short allowance of books. His father read nothing but the Bristol Journal. A small glass cupboard in the back parlour, fastened up against the wall, was sufficient to hold the wine-glasses and all the library. But in the holidays he gets back again to Bath, and to Bull's circulating library. He meets, at his aunt's, people who talk about authors – even sees an author or two – learns that they are greater personages even than the players. In one of these holidays a lady gives him a copy of Hoole's translation of the Jerusalem Delivered. This led him into a new course of poetical reading; it converted the budding dramatist into an epic poet. The Tasso introduced him to the translation of the Orlando Furioso, and this to Spenser's Fairy Queen. How he read, how he revelled in these books!

"The copy of Hoole's version (of Tasso) which Mrs Dolignon sent me, is now," he says, "in my sight upon the shelf, and in excellent preservation, considering that when a schoolboy I perused it so often that I had no small portion of it by heart. Forty years have tarnished the gilding upon its back, but they have not effaced my remembrance of the joy with which I received it, and the delight which I found in its repeated perusal… Hoole, in his notes, frequently referred to the Orlando Furioso. I saw some volumes thus lettered, on Bull's counter, and my heart leaped for joy. They proved to be the original; but the shopman, Mr Cruett, (a most obliging man he was,) immediately put the translation into my hands; and I do not think any accession of fortune could now give me so much delight as I then derived from that vile version of Hoole's. There, in the notes, I first saw the name of Spenser, and some stanzas of the Fairy Queen. Accordingly, when I returned the last volume, I asked if that work was in the library. My friend Cruett replied that they had it, but it was written in old English, and I should not be able to understand it. This did not appear to me so much a necessary consequence as he supposed, and I therefore requested he would let me look at it. It was the quarto edition of '17, in three volumes, with large prints folded in the middle, equally worthless (like all the prints of that age) in design and execution. There was nothing in the language to impede, for the ear set me right where the uncouth spelling (orthography it cannot be called) might have puzzled the eye; and the few words which are really obsolete were sufficiently explained by the context. No young lady of the present generation falls to a new novel of Sir Walter Scott's with keener relish than I did that morning to the Fairy Queen." – (Vol. i. p. 83.)

He had commenced poet, as we have said, at an earlier age than he can call to mind, so that his first rhymes are utterly lost in the oblivion of childhood. He can only remember that this discovery that he could rhyme gave him great pleasure, and that his mother seemed equally gratified, and still more proud of the achievement. When in the habit of reading and witnessing so many plays, he of course wrote dramas. His first subject was "The Continence of Scipio!" Now that Tasso and Ariosto were his great delight, he commenced the epic or the metrical romance. He would graft a story upon the Orlando Furioso. Arcadia should be the scene and give the title to the poem. There he would bring the Moors, and there should his hero Astolfo, riding on a Hippogriff, &c. &c. This must have been, he says, when he was between nine and ten, for some verses of it were written on the covers of his Phædrus. They were in the heroic couplet.

It is curious to notice that, although writing heroic couplets on the covers of his Phœdrus, his first task in prose composition was accomplished with extreme difficulty. The master, Mr Williams, would sometimes tell the boys to write a letter upon any subject that they pleased. Nothing had ever perplexed our young poet so much as this task. He actually cried for perplexity and vexation. At last he set to work. A Salisbury Guide had fallen in his way; he wrote a long description of Stonehenge, and his master was not less surprised than delighted with it. He himself was unconscious of having done anything extraordinary, till the envy of his schoolfellows made him aware that he had surpassed them all. On coming to school next morning, some half-dozen of them beset him, and demanded "whether he, with all his learning, could tell what the letters i. e. stood for? You have written a description of Stonehenge, now tell us what i. e. stands for." Southey dashed at an answer, "John the Evangelist, I suppose." They shouted with triumph.

In after years, when Southey had written Don Roderick, there were many pedants disposed to ask him what i. e. stands for.

But now his maternal uncle, the Reverend Herbert Hill, always his kind friend and benefactor, determines to send the intelligent lad to Westminster school, and then to the University of Oxford. By way of preparation, he is removed from Mr Williams' academy, and placed under the care and tuition of a clergyman. We have not traced him through the various schools he attended – it would be waste of time; we have seen what was the real process of his education. Here, also, according to his own account, the progress of his mind was very little connected with the formal tuition he received.

"I do not remember," he says, "in any part of my life, to have been so conscious of intellectual improvement as I was during the year and a half before I was placed at Westminster; an improvement derived not from books or instruction, but from constantly exercising myself in English verse; and from the development of mind which that exercise produced, I can distinctly trace my progress by help of a list, made thirty years ago, of all my compositions in verse, which were then in existence, or which I had at that time destroyed." – (Vol. i. p. 117).

Before entering Westminster, our autobiographer takes a retrospective glance at his home in Bristol, and gives a most graphic description of his aunt, Miss Tyler. That lady has earned an immortality which she little dreamt of, and would have hardly coveted. Already every English reader knows Miss Tyler. She will live for ever as a type of that class of ladies, whether spinsters or married, who let their love of order and cleanliness grow into a disease – ladies who keep the best rooms in their house in such a superstitious neatness, that they are no longer habitable. The disorder usually drives people from their pleasant and spacious drawing-room into close back-parlours, deserving of a visit from the Sanitary Commission. In the case of Miss Tyler, it drove her from the parlour to the kitchen, from the best kitchen into what should have been the scullery. We hope those ladies in whom the disease has not yet attained such a height may take warning by the terrible example of Miss Tyler. For the rest, she was a woman of violent temper, and of a proud imperious disposition.

Of course, in a house kept with so much neatness as Miss Tyler's, no other boy was likely to be admitted; no other specimen of that race whose shoes no quantity of mats or matting could have rendered clean, or afforded sufficient protection against; and who might have even placed his corduroys on the lady's own chair – an offence which, we are assured, would have excited the highest indignation. Young Southey, therefore, had few playmates. Shad, a handy lad, kept for all manner of garden or out-of-door work, was his chief companion. He might well say that "few boys were ever less qualified for the discipline of a public school." He had, however, an elastic and buoyant spirit, which, notwithstanding this unsuitable preparation for such a scene, enabled him to meet the trials and the turmoil of Westminster school. It was on the 1st April 1788 that he entered there. A rough apprenticeship to life it seems to have been. One boy holds our epic poet out of window by the leg, to the manifest peril of his skull. Another appoints him, "by the law of fist," to write all his Latin exercises, with the special injunction that they shall be always "bad enough" to pass muster as the composition of the bully and the dunce. We suppose all this has been reformed since Southey's time, and that the following picture is curious only as a record of the past. In this "interior" the Westminster scholars look very much like a buccaneer's crew: —

"Our boarding-house was under the tyranny of W. F – . He was, in Westminster language, a great beast; that is, in plain truth, a great brute – as great a one as ever went upon two legs. But there are two sorts of human brutes; those who partake of wolf nature, or of pig nature; and F – was of the better breed, if it be better to be wolfish than swinish. He would have made a good prize fighter, a good buccaneer, or, in the days of Cœur de Lion, or of my Cid, a good knight, to have cut down the misbelievers with a strong arm and a hearty good will. Everybody feared and hated him; and yet it was universally felt that he saved the house from the tyranny of a greater beast than himself. This was a fellow by name B – , who was mean and malicious, which F – was not: I do not know what became of him; his name has not appeared in the Tyburn Calendar, which was the only place to look for it; and if he has been hanged, it must have been under an alias– an observation which is frequently made, when he is spoken of by his schoolfellows. He and F – were of an age and standing, the giants of the house; but F – was the braver, and did us the good office of keeping him in order. They hated each other cordially, and the evening before we were rid of 'Butcher B – ,' F – gave the whole house the great satisfaction of giving him a good thrashing." – (Vol. i. p. 150.)

Then follow some other and more amusing accounts of his schoolfellows, and of their after position and fortunes in the world, and the fragment concludes. It does not even relate the history of his expulsion from Westminster – apparently a very severe punishment for the offence he had committed. The boys had set up a paper called The Flagellant. In one of the numbers, which Southey had written, the subject of corporal punishment was handled in a manner which by no means pleased the headmaster; and for this offence he was, as is here expressed, privately expelled. The first appearance in print of our voluminous author was not fortunate.

With this event, therefore, Mr Cuthbert Southey commences the slight thread of biography on which these letters are strung. How far this expulsion from Westminster, by exasperating the mind of our young author, tended to foster a certain democratic and rebellious mode of thinking, we have no accurate means of judging; we can only guess that it would have some such tendency. He was now to proceed to Oxford; but the expelled of Westminster was rejected at Christ Church, in which college his uncle had particularly wished him to enter. He found refuge at Balliol, where he was admitted Nov. 3, 1792.

We have lost our guide, and the only guide that could have traced for us the course of his reading and the progress of his mind. Southey now somewhat abruptly appears before us as the ardent republican, and something verging on the communist. We left him with Tasso and the Fairy Queen, inditing or planning innumerable epics. We find him writing Wat Tyler, that poem whose singular history we shall have, by and by, to allude to. From intimations scattered through these letters, we learn that he had dieted rather freely upon Rousseau; that he had "corrected" this diet by a course of Godwin; and that with Godwin he had united Epictetus and Stoic morality. As aunt Tyler had purchased a translation of Rousseau's Emilie in order to educate her pupil, it is probable that he had heard of the philosopher of Geneva at a very early period. Perhaps it was the Contrat Social that first received him when he stepped from poetry to philosophy. At all events, the captivating ideas of perfect liberty and equality, which are there set forth, had taken full possession of his youthful mind.

At college his industry was still of the same vagrant self-directed description that it had hitherto been. He read much, but he did not distinguish himself in the special studies of the place, nor desired to do so. Now his uncle, the Rev. H. Hill, had designed that his nephew should enter the Church, where only he had the means of assisting his future advancement in life. When Southey first came to Oxford, he contemplated this as his future destination, though probably with no very good will. But it is quite evident that his course of reading and thinking has not been fitting him for the Church; and we are not at all surprised to find that this disinclination to take holy orders amounts at length to a decided and unconquerable repugnance. We might be rather surprised to find, as we do, that, throughout this era of the reign of liberty and equality, he retains his fervent and deep-rooted sentiments of piety. What exactly his theological creed had become, we have no distinct evidence before us: probably it was unsettled enough. But it is quite remarkable how strong a faith he has, throughout the whole of his career, in the great fundamental doctrine of religion – a future state of existence. It is no mere doctrinal belief, no dim and shadowy foreboding; it was such a belief as a European has in the existence of the continent of America. No emigrant can have a stronger conviction that he shall reach the new country he has embarked for, or that he shall meet such of his friends as have preceded him on the same voyage, than Southey has in that future world to which we are sailing over the ocean of time.

Mr Cuthbert Southey very wisely refrains from speaking decidedly upon his father's religious opinions. He leaves the impression on our mind that, according to his view, the Unitarian heresy was the utmost limit of his divergence from the orthodox standard. We doubt if Southey, at this time, had formed any doctrinal system full and precise enough to be classed under the name of Unitarianism. However that may be, it was impossible for him, with his relaxed creed, and his high sense of moral rectitude, to think of entering the Church. Such unhappily being the state of his opinions, he very properly abandoned all idea of taking orders. At a subsequent period of his life, we may remark that his repugnance to subscribe the articles of the Church of England may very fairly be attributed far more to the moral feelings than to the religious opinions of the man, far more to an extreme scrupulosity and the reluctance to fetter himself, than to any absolute heresy. This we may have an opportunity of showing as we advance farther in the correspondence.

But the Church being resigned, it was necessary to look out for some other career. He thinks of physic, and studies anatomy for a short time, but the dissecting-room disgusts him. He thinks, as doubtless many others have thought, and are thinking still, that some official appointment which would occupy his mornings with business, and leave his evenings for philosophy and poetry, would be a very suitable position, and he writes to his friend Bedford for his advice and interest in the matter. His friend bids him reflect whether he, with his burning republicanism, was exactly the person most likely to obtain the much sought for patronage of Government. At last he thinks of emigration. Rousseau and Coleridge convert the scheme of emigration into the project of Pantisocracy. Here is the provision for life, and liberty, and equality. The scheme is perfect. It will be house and home – it will be philosophy put in action.

The letters of Southey are not at this time the interesting compositions which some may have expected to find them; neither do they give us much insight into the details of this great scheme (though tried on a small scale) of a community of goods. The earlier letters – say those which, immediately succeeding the autobiography, occupy the remaining part of the first volume of the work – are indeed anything but pleasing or agreeable. The editor himself speaks of them in the following manner: "His letters, which at this time seem to have been exercises in composition, give evidence of his industry, and at the same time indicate a mind imbued with heathen philosophy and Grecian republicanism. They are written often in a style of inflated declamation, which, as we shall see, before many years had passed, subsided into a more natural and tranquil tone under the influence of his matured taste." They are the letters of a clever confident youth, and quite as disagreeable as such effusions usually are; full of flippant absurd judgments on men and things, varied with that affected self-disparagement which never fails to form a conspicuous part of such compositions. Their writers are profound philosophers at one moment, and rail at philosophy the next; full of their future fame, yet despising the only occupation that they love. "I am ready," says Southey, "to quarrel with my friends for not making me a carpenter, and with myself for devoting myself to pursuits certainly unimportant, and of no real utility either to myself or to others." One gets nothing from letters of this description. Our account of Pantisocracy we must take from the words of the editor himself: —

"We have seen," he says, "that in one or two of his early letters my father speaks of emigration to America as having entered his mind; and the failure of the plans I have just mentioned now caused him to turn his thoughts more decidedly in that direction; and the result was a scheme of emigration, to which those who conceived it gave the euphonious name of 'Pantisocracy.' This idea, it appears, was first originated by Mr Coleridge and one or two of his friends; and he mentioned it to my father, on becoming acquainted with him at Oxford. Their plan was to collect as many brother adventurers as they could, and to establish a community in the New World upon the most thoroughly social basis. Land was to be purchased with their common contributions, and to be cultivated by their common labour. Each was to have his portion of work assigned him; and they calculated that a large part of their time would still remain for social converse and literary pursuits. The females of the party – for all were to be married men – were to cook, and perform all domestic affairs; and having even gone so far as to plan the architecture of their cottages, and the form of their settlement, they had pictured as pleasant a Utopia as ever entered an ardent mind." – (P. 211.)