Writing the Empire: Robert Southey and Romantic Colonialism (review)

In a letter dated 6 April 1805, Robert Southey declared that unless 'the duty and policy of introducing Christianity into our East Indian possessions' were adopted, 'I prophesy that by the year 2000 there will be more remains of the Portuguese than of the English Empire in the East'. Southey's prophecies were not always inspired, but he maintained that he wrote for posterity. He would certainly delight in the twenty-first-century restoration of what Byron called his 'unsaleables' to the canon, facilitated by the labours of Lynda Pratt, Tim Fulford and their energetic editorial team on the Pickering and Chatto edition of Southey's works, of which our author is a notable member.

Reading Carol Bolton's substantial and valuable Writing the Empire, I was reminded of the laureate poem, 'Ode Written after the King's Visit to Scotland' (1822), where Southey identifies 'an empire which survives' the Volneyan ruins of realms, 'an empire in the mind / Of intellectual man', which 'By indefeasible right / Hath Britain made her own'. In his epic Anglo-centricity Southey surveys the globe wondering at its awful foreignness, while pondering how British Protestant rationality would make a better colonialist job of it. Contemporary Caledonians might play a part in the 'fair conquest' of India, as the medieval Cymry had done their best along the Missouri, but the future lay with the Anglophone: 'Whereso'er / The British tongue may spread, / (A goodly tree, whose leaf / no winter e'er shall nip) / Earthly immortals, there, her sons of fame, / Will have their heritage'. Tongues of oak are our men, and Southey, writing in a letter from 1800, sets his knotty mind against the Indo-European family tree model of 'Jones's dotage'; the 'refined' Sanskrit-derived languages of India, he writes, are 'a baboon jargon not worth learning'. Though Bolton effectively displays how Southey's epics were poetic justifications of the civilising role of British colonialism, there is perhaps insufficient attention paid to the imperialising mission that Southey described in 1805 as 'the eventual triumph of the English language over all others'. Bolton notes an equivalent Cymric chauvinism in Madoc's joy at hearing Welsh on 'foreign lips'. (Significantly, the seventeenth-century colonialist founder of Providence, Rhode Island, Roger Williams, whom Southey cites in his notes to Madoc, detected in his 1643 Key Into the Language of America 'a greater Affinity' between Native American languages and 'the Greek Tongue'.) Bolton explores 'the nationalistic project' that emerges in Kehama, but sometimes underestimates the universalising tendencies of Southey's Anglomania. As Southey wrote in a letter of 1803: 'I want English knowledge and the English language diffused to the east, and west, and the south.'

Southey was no Roger Williams, but Bolton thoughtfully examines the ironies and ambivalence – if not the belatedness – of Southey's desire to found a utopian community within a colony whose rebellion had caused the loss of Britain's first empire. In late 1793 he could invite a friend to share an Adamite fantasy: 'fancy only me in America', chopping down trees, cutting up snakes and constructing a cabin, realising Cowley's dreams of American retirement and outdoing primitivist Rousseauvian seclusion. But slaves and writing-paper can be readily purchased nearby: 'my only companion some poor negro whom I have bought on purpose to emancipate'. It is a pity that Bolton omits a rare note of self-analytical self-mockery: '[s]o vanity, vanity will come from my lips, and poor Southey will either be cooked for a Cherokee, or oysterized by a tiger'. As 'Southeyopolis' morphed into Pantisocracy, the lumberjacks Southey and Coleridge could imagine themselves discussing metaphysics while felling a tree or analysing poetry while hunting buffalo. All their imagined political, aspheterist, philosophical and religious liberties were predicated on an uneasy mixture of colonialist exploitation and the fear of a tomahawk blow to the skull.

Having failed with their own communal project, these seekers of Utopia seem determined...