Self-Management

Seamus Perry

• Robert Southey: Poetical Works 1793-1810 edited by Lynda Pratt, Tim Fulford and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts
  Pickering & Chatto, 2624 pp, £450.00, May 2004, ISBN 1 85196 731 1

On 15 June 1794, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, prodigious, garrulous and chubby, his brilliant undergraduate career in tatters, set out from Cambridge in the company of a steady companion called Hucks, picturesquely intent on a walking tour of North Wales. Their route took them through Oxford, where they looked up one of Coleridge’s old schoolmates, who took the visitors to see a notorious democrat at Balliol called Robert Southey. It was an encounter that, Southey would recall, ‘fixed the future fortunes of us both’. The tourists had planned to stop in Oxford for three or four days but ended up staying three weeks. When they finally set out for Wales, Coleridge’s head was buzzing with Southey and Southey’s audacious politics, which seemed to chime so excitingly not only with his own but with the progressive spirit of the age. ‘Few persons but those who lived in it,’ Southey wrote thirty years later, ‘can conceive or comprehend what the memory of the French Revolution was, nor what a visionary world seemed to open upon those who were just entering it. Old things seemed passing away, and nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the human race.’

Vol. 28 No. 2 · 26 January 2006 » Seamus Perry » Self-Management (print version)
Pages 18-21 | 5536 words