Robert Southey Lives of Labouring-Class Poets

Tim Fulford is an experienced editor of Southey’s poetry and prose, and also of the poetry and correspondence of the labouring-class writers Robert Bloomfield and Henry Kirke White.

• AcknowledgementsList of AbbreviationsEditorial Introduction1 Southey’s review of James Grant Raymond, The Life of Thomas Dermody, Interspersed with Pieces of Original Poetry, The Annual Review, 5 (1806), 382–3972 Southey’s Account of the Life of Henry Kirke White, from The Remains Of Henry Kirke White, 2 vols (London, 1807)3 Southey’s Review of Samuel F. B. Morse, Amir Khan, and other Poems: the Remains of Lucretia Maria Davidson, The Quarterly Review, 41 (1829), 289–3014 Southey’s Introduction to Attempts in Verse, by John Jones, an Old Servant: with Some Account of the Writer, Written by Himself: and an Introductory Essay on the Lives and Works of Our Uneducated Poets (London, 1831) Stephen DuckJames WoodhouseJohn BennetAnn YearsleyJohn Frederick BryantAn Account of John Jones’s Life Written by Himself 5 Southey’s Review of Eliza Bray, Fables, and other Pieces in Verse, by Mary Maria Colling, The Quarterly Review, 47 (1832), 81–103Appendix I: Correspondence Concerning the LivesAppendix II: Reviews of and Comments on the LivesAppendix III: The Poems of John JonesEndnotesIndex

"Fulford’s edition of the Lives works both to recover many writings by Robert Southey that have been previously overlooked and to position Southey at an early point in Marxist debates about class and capitalism. Such debates would erupt during the second half of the nineteenth century; today they continue with equal or perhaps greater relevance into the twenty-first. Southey’s “alternative, lower-class canon” (26) appears at a time when scholars of Romanticism are seeking to expand our sense of what sorts of writings from this period can be studied. It also continues the work of reassessing Southey’s career not only as a poet, but as a prolific reviewer and democratic compiler of other authors, whose professional activities are strongly marked by a belief in the universal benevolence of literature. This book should be of interest to anyone studying British Romanticism or the literature of the nineteenth century, especially those interested in laboring-class verse, the lives of poets from outside the “Big 6” canon, and Southey’s interventions into the period’s accepted hegemonies of literary taste."Adam Neikirk, The Charles Lamb Society