My days among the dead are past full#

Without his prior knowledge, the Earl of Radnor, an admirer of his work, had Southey returned as MP for the latter's pocket borough seat of Downton in Wiltshire at the 1826 general election, as an opponent of Catholic emancipation, but Southey refused to sit, causing a by-election in December that year, pleading that he did not have a large enough estate to support him through political life, or want to take on the hours full attendance required. Byron retaliated with The Vision of Judgment, a parody of Southey's poem. While not naming Byron, it was clearly directed at him. In response, Southey attacked what he called the Satanic School among modern poets in the preface to his poem, A Vision of Judgement, written after the death of George III. Much of the animosity between the two men can be traced back to Byron's belief that Southey had spread rumours about him and Percy Bysshe Shelley being in a 'League of Incest' during their time on Lake Geneva in 1816, an accusation that Southey strenuously denied. This was based both on Byron's lack of respect for Southey's literary talent, and his disdain for what he perceived as Southey's hypocritical turn to conservatism later in life. In the poem Southey is dismissed as insolent, narrow and shabby. He was often mocked for what were seen as sycophantic odes to the king, notably in Byron's long ironic dedication of Don Juan to Southey. Feathernest in his 1817 satirical novel Melincourt. In a spirited response Southey wrote an open letter to the MP, in which he explained that he had always aimed at lessening human misery and bettering the condition of all the lower classes and that he had only changed in respect of 'the means by which that amelioration was to be effected.' As he put it, 'that as he learnt to understand the institutions of his country, he learnt to appreciate them rightly, to love, and to revere, and to defend them.' Īnother critic of Southey in his later period was Thomas Love Peacock, who scorned him in the character of Mr. In his portrait of Southey, in The Spirit of the Age, he wrote: 'He wooed Liberty as a youthful lover, but it was perhaps more as a mistress than a bride and he has since wedded with an elderly and not very reputable lady, called Legitimacy.' Southey largely ignored his critics but was forced to defend himself when William Smith, a member of Parliament, rose in the House of Commons on 14 March to attack him. One of his most savage critics was William Hazlitt.

This was instigated by his enemies in an attempt to embarrass the Poet Laureate and highlight his apostasy from radical poet to supporter of the Tory establishment. In 1817, Southey was confronted with the surreptitious publication of a radical play, Wat Tyler, which he had written in 1794 at the height of his radical period.

They saw him as selling out for money and respectability. Given his departure from radicalism, and his attempts to have former fellow travellers prosecuted, it is unsurprising that less successful contemporaries who kept the faith attacked Southey. He sympathised with the pioneering socialist plans of Robert Owen, advocated that the state promote public works to maintain high employment, and called for universal education. He was appalled by the living conditions in towns like Birmingham and Manchester and especially by employment of children in factories and outspoken about them. For example, he was an early critic of the evils the new factory system brought to early 19th-century Britain. In some respects, Southey was ahead of his time in his views on social reform. Such writers were guilty, he wrote in the Quarterly Review, of 'inflaming the turbulent temper of the manufacturer and disturbing the quiet attachment of the peasant to those institutions under which he and his fathers have dwelt in peace.' Wooler and Hone were acquitted, but the threats caused another target, William Cobbett, to emigrate temporarily to the United States. He had in mind figures like Thomas Jonathan Wooler and William Hone, whose prosecution he urged. In 1817 he privately proposed penal transportation for those guilty of 'libel' or 'sedition'. He argued against parliamentary reform ('the railroad to ruin with the Devil for driver'), blamed the Peterloo Massacre on an allegedly revolutionary 'rabble' killed and injured by government troops, and spurned Catholic emancipation. Embraced by the Tory establishment as Poet Laureate, and from 1807 in receipt of a yearly stipend from them, he vigorously supported the Liverpool government. A 1797 caricature of Southey's early radical poetryĪlthough originally a radical supporter of the French Revolution, Southey followed the trajectory of his fellow Romantic poets Wordsworth and Coleridge towards conservatism.

My days among the dead are past