Centre for Regional Literature and Culture

The Collected Letters of Robert Southey

Sketch of Southey by ‘R.A.B.’, reproduced with kind permission of Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries, British Columbia, Canada

‘... the only existing entire man of letters’

       Byron

Loved and loathed in equal measures by his contemporaries, the poet, biographer, historian and social and cultural critic Robert Southey (1774-1843) was one of the most public and controversial figures in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain. 

The Collected Letters will make it possible for scholars to access for the first time his complete surviving correspondence.  By providing annotated and accurate texts of Southey's letters, newly edited from manuscript originals, and by mounting them on a free-access, fully-searchable website via the international, peer-reviewed web-journal Romantic Circles, the edition will completely revolutionize both availability of the letters and scholarly understanding of their importance. The edition is divided into eight parts. These will be broken down as follows: I: 1791-1797, II:1798-1803, III:1804-09, IV:1810-15, V:1816-21, VI:1822-27, VII:1828-33, VIII:1834-39.  

Led by the co-directors Lynda Pratt and Tim Fulford, The Collected Letters brings together an interdisciplinary team of leading scholars. The project is based in the School of English Studies at the University of Nottingham.

Research on the edition has been supported by grants from the AHRC, the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, and research fellowships from the Beinecke Library, Yale University, the Huntington Library, San Marino, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Library, University of Texas, Austin, and Princeton University Library. Pump-priming funding was provided by the Humanities Research Centre and the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Group at the University of Nottingham.