The Robert Southey Project - Archives

Although their value to critics, historians and biographers has long been recognized, Southey’s letters, unlike those of his direct contemporaries Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, have never been edited in their entirety.

Overview

The majority of his published letters are currently available only in heavily censored nineteenth-century selections and some 4000 surviving letters have never been published at all.

The extant manuscripts of Southey’s letters are dispersed in roughly 215 international archives. Appropriately for a writer whose works reflect the globalized nature of British Romanticism, these archives cover a huge geographical area: ranging from Auckland, New Zealand, to Uppsala, Sweden; from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to Tomsk in Siberia.

At a more localized level, Southey letters can be found in the archives of the Hallward Library, University of Nottingham and Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire.