SOURCE: An introduction to Robert Southey and His Age: The Development of a Conservative Mind, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1960, pp. 1-11.

In the following essay, Carnali surveys the events that contributed to the conservative thinking of Southey and other early nineteenth-century figures,.

In the years that followed Waterloo, few men were more obnoxious to radicals and democrats than Robert Southey. Not only was he a court hireling, an enemy to liberty, a man who wanted to punish seditious libel with transportation; but worse, he was an apostate. There was a time when he too had been loud in defence of liberty, and shared the generous enthusiasm of the French Revolution. It was unkindly supposed that he had been bribed into his Toryism: first by a pension, and then by the office of Poet Laureate. This explanation, however, is almost as unconvincing as Southey's own view that he...