Robert Southey: History, Politics, Religion by Stuart Andrews (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 621 neglected full length. Nevertheless, there is an anti-republican spirit in the book’s nineteenth-century teleology. Its resting places of tone and perspec­ tive are the 1839 Keble Oxford address and the 1843 crowning ofWordsworth as poet laureate of Queen Victoria. The mere mention of this fact on the last page works as if magically to bring Wordsworth safely home (212). And it is made without the countervailing suggestion that this arrival at a safe harbor of national reputation destroyed many promises elsewhere. Still, on any reckoning, Gill hardly can be said to sidestep the “radical years.” He knows them as well as anyone. Of those earliest years, Words­ worth’s Reoisitings emphasizes their uneven mix ofastonishing verse and the “overt protest poetry” (200) in which Gill finds “a parade of specimen fig­ ures in tableaux” (196—97), “identikit protest polemic” (191). Here I won­ der if philosophical “theory” hasn’t delivered a fuller repertoire of ways than Gill has found ofattending to Wordsworth’s most radical thinking and to the sublime poetry. Yet it would not do to require Wordsworth’s ablest biographer also to be a commentator on the poet of dispossession—“when the winds are gone / And no one can tell whither” (DC MS 16 Drafts of “Nutting”). Eric Lindstrom University of Vermont Stuart Andrews. Robert Southey: History, Politics, Religion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. 270. $95. Stuart Andrews’s new book argues for Southey’s “literary and . . . historical importance,” and the lasting significance of his “seeming . . . paranoia,” both political and religious (xi). It is a book, Andrews says, “about Southey the poet laureate, rather than Southey the poet” (ix). It could equally be described as a study of the “Catholic question,” from the 1790s to 1829, with an ensemble cast of Southey, Coleridge, John Milner, Charles Butler, Blanco White, Richard Musgrave, and many others. But Catholic emanci­ pation is a particularly rewarding angle for a “life and letters” of Southey, who was, in Hazlitt’s phrase, “not shaped on any model.” Southey’s biog­ rapher Bill Speck describes him as an oddity and an anachronism, “almost a Quaker,” who behaved like “a seventeenth-century Anglican” at war with both “Popery” and “enthusiasm.”1 But Southey’s stance looks less odd in I. See The Collected Letters ofRobert Southey, A Romantic Circles Electronic Edition. Available at: http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/southey_letters (CLRS); letter 1530; and W. A. Speck, Robert Southey: Entire Man ofLetters (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 129, 169. SiR, 53 (Winter 2014) 622 BOOK REVIEWS view of the antediluvian nature of his “(Roman) Catholic” enemy. The Romantic epoch of 1798 was also the year Napoleon abolished the papacy by “Act ofthe Sovereign People” (1). Robert Peel later recalled how “reli­ gion, we were told, was ... a volcano burnt out, that could never be re­ kindled” (qtd. 172). Like William Pitt, the Catholic polemicistJohn Milner asked rhetorically if it was “from the side of Popery, or from the opposite quarter ofJacobinism, that the Established Church is in most danger at the present day” (qtd. 8). But the Union of Great Britain and Ireland of 1801 turned the defunct “danger” into a contradiction at the heart of political life. As Coleridge later summed it up: There is and can be but one question: and there is and can be but one way of stating it. A great numerical majority of the inhabitants of one integral part ofthe realm profess a religion hostile to that professed by the great majority of the whole realm. ... In fewer words, threefourths of his Majesty’s Irish subjects are Roman Catholics, with a pa­ pal priesthood, while three-fourths of the sum total of His Majesty’s subjects are Protestants. (Church and State; qtd. 2) The “Catholic question” created a problem for political language. After 1801, the “integral part” not only does not imply, but is “hostile to,” the greater whole. Charles Butler suggested that even this was a “false . . . per­ spective,” giving a two-page list of the vastly more “extensive territories" where Roman Catholicism was the established religion (qtd. 1 14). Southey reasserted the Protestant “perspective” by mocking such exhibitions...