SOURCE: “Robert Southey: Toryism and the Social Question,” in Romanticism and the Social Order 1780-1830, Blandford Press, 1969, pp. 263-86.

In the following essay, Harris explains Southey's social and political beliefs, their evolution, and how they are reflected in his epic poems, histories, biographies, and essays.

Of all the tory writers, none was more deeply concerned with the social problems of the time than Robert Southey. At the age of eighteen, as an undergraduate of Balliol, he had celebrated the French Revolution with an epic on Joan of Arc. He despised what he called ‘the pedantry, prejudice, and aristocracy’ of the university, gave up powdering his hair, and was accounted a Jacobin. Under the influence of Coleridge, and with his friend Robert Lovell, he threw himself into Pantisocracy, a plan for a perfect social life on the banks of the Susquehanna. He incorporated his republican sentiments in a drama...