Robert Southey Lives of Labouring-Class Poets

“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