Books: The other Romantic

ROBERT SOUTHEY: A Life by Mark Storey, OUP pounds 25

They may not be around to appreciate it, but these are exciting times for the Romantics. In the past few years Richard Holmes has made a wonderful job of enhancing Coleridge's reputation, Stephen Gill has rehabilitated Wordsworth's, and Peter Ackroyd has made us look again at Blake. Soon, two more eagerly awaited studies - Andrew Motion of Keats, Tom Paulin of Hazlitt - will continue the reappraising trend. The major works of these writers, and of Byron and Shelley, look more alive now than they've done for some time.

But what of Southey? Any literary historian seeking to revivify him, as Mark Storey tries to in this conscientious biography, is going to have his work cut out. In his lifetime (1774- 1843), Southey was famous, a respected poet, historian, critic, biographer and translator, and a controversial Poet Laureate. But within a year of his death, Wordsworth was reflecting how few people could remember a single line of his. Fewer still today can be aware that he was the first English writer to set down the story of the Three Bears. Even those who recognise him as a friend of Coleridge are unlikely to have read any of the verse, except perhaps the epic "Madoc" or anti-war ballad "After Blenheim". Uncertainty affects even his name: should it be pronounced like "mouthy", the word Byron rhymed it with when alluding to Southey's garrulous manner? Or has it the same vowel-sound as "mother"?

Mother was a word with a special place in Southey's heart, although as a child he saw his own mother infrequently. Born to a struggling Bristol draper, packed off at two to live with a frightening maiden aunt, then shuttled between various boarding schools and elderly relations, he had a peripatetic childhood. At least he survived it, unlike four of his eight siblings. And he retained the fondest feelings for his mother, with her sweet temper, kindness and "moral magnetism".

At 13, Southey was sent to Westminster, at the expense of an uncle in Lisbon. His schooling there coincided with the French Revolution, which fired him with radical ideas. In the fifth number of the school magazine he helped to found, he wrote a pseudonymous attack on corporal punishment: "Now, since there is but one God, whosoever flog, that is, performeth the will of Satan, committeth an abomination." Since flogging was then as essential a part of public-school life as Latin and Greek, the head of Westminster wasn't having this. Southey's cover duly blown, he was expelled.

Rather than proceeding to Christ Church and a career in the C of E, Southey cast himself in the role of rebel and iconoclast, a bearer of the torch of liberty. The fact that he still proceeded smoothly to Balliol did not make him feel any less martyred or self-righteous. He read Tom Paine, deified Robespierre, railed against slavery and the condition of the poor, and became a staunch republican. Coleridge, a close if squabbling friend, declared him "truly a man of perpendicular Virtue - a downright upright Republican!"

Even at 20, though, Southey had a more conventional, worldly side: "Let me have 200 a year & the comforts of domestic life & my ambition aspires no further." For a time the dream of a just society and of cheerful domesticity were joined in Pantisocracy, his attempt, with Coleridge, to persuade a group of like-minded friends to decamp to the banks of the Susquehanna and there build a new Eden. Southey tried genuinely hard to get the scheme off the ground, unlike the more fitful Coleridge. But his way of speaking of his Utopian community was unconvincingly cosy: "Linen drying at the fire! one person clean starching - one ironing - & one reading aloud in the room - blessed scene to write in! Oh for my transatlantic log house!" It must have been clear to all which sex would be doing the ironing, and which the reading. Southey planned to invite his mother along, too.

Pantisocracy came to nothing, but Southey rescued something from the scheme by marrying one of its adherents, Edith Fricker, whose sister Sara married Coleridge at the same time. Quite what attracted Southey to the self-effacing Edith isn't easy to see, and Mark Storey doesn't shed much light on it. "In her company," Southey said in a rare but characteristically mystifying comment on the relationship, "I experienced always that unquiet state of delight which made me embarrassed & sometimes made me wish myself away." But there is no doubt he thought of theirs as a happy marriage, unlike Coleridge and Sara's. In due course it produced several children, whose lives and deaths drew them closer.

Marrying at 22 made Southey buckle down. Even as a student he had a conscientious streak, rising at five to write, and now it became his pattern to set himself a prodigious daily output. Leaving others to be the anarchists and will o' the wisps of the Romantic movement, he was its workhorse. He said he liked to compose at speed, and revise at leisure, but was usually too quickly on to the next thing to have time for second thoughts. Congratulating himself in his mid-30s on having produced 22 books, he thought five more each year a reasonable target. He was the Anthony Burgess of his day. His vast unread opus serves as a salutary reminder that graft is not enough.

Though his early poetry had some savage reviews, it had admirers, too, and at least he could defend it as intended "to force into notice the situation of the poor, & to represent them as the victims of the present state of society." When Shelley sought him out in the Lakes, it was to pay homage to an inspiring radical, "a really great man". But once they met Shelley was swiftly disenchanted: "He to whom Bigotry, Tyranny and Law was hateful has become the votary of these Idols, in a form the most disgusting." Others soon felt the same, notably Hazlitt, who commented on his "strange emasculation", and Byron, who was merciless in exposing his self-contradictions:

"He had written praises of a regicide;

He had written praises of all kings whatever;

He had written for republics far and wide,

And then against them bitterer than ever ..."

It's sad to think that this is Southey's only relevance now, as the man who performed one of history's most notorious political U-turns.

Pugnacious and undeterred, Southey said it wasn't he who had changed but the world. With one eye on his bank balance and the other on posterity - "there can be no doubt that I shall be sufficiently talked of whenever I am gone" - he continued to churn and grind away, ever amazed by his own talents. When he became Poet Laureate, an honour that fell to him mainly because Walter Scott wisely refused it, he told a friend that "in accepting the office, I am conferring a favour rather than receiving one".

In later years, Southey kept his distance from London and, despite being embraced by the establishment, liked to see himself as a voice crying in the wilderness. Certainly some of his views go beyond those of orthodox bigotry: a proposal to send "anarchists" like Hazlitt to Botany Bay may have been made in jest, but he was serious in suggesting that "if the country is compelled to feed able-bodied paupers, it thereby acquires the right of transporting them to any place where that can be done at the easiest rate". It's a long way from his indictment of poverty in Manchester, or the dream of justice and equality by the Susquehanna.

Far from exonerating the apostate to whom he has devoted a fair part of his own life, Mark Storey attributes blame where blame is due, comparing Southey's chillingly neutral reaction to the Peterloo massacre, for example, to the way some spoke of Bloody Sunday in 1971. Nor does he make much of a case for the poetry, which he knows would be an impossible task. Even the private man, to whom he is sympathetic, he finds often forbiddingly cold and stern. What he does do is remind us of how central a figure Southey was in the great events and issues of his day. And though the rather plodding method of his biography - one thing, then the next thing - makes one cry out for something more shapely, or passionate, or even eccentric, his patient, fair-minded advocacy is as much as Southey could hope for and better than he deserves.