Robert Southey's Letters to Edward Hawke Locker

Abstract

T he Huntington Library possesses ten letters of Robert Southey to Edward Hawke Locker (LR 323-332) that appear to have been overlooked by previous editors of his correspondence and by students of his life and writings. The earliest of them, dated 1 January 1820, was apparently the first letter Southey wrote to Locker. In addition to these ten letters I have located three others that have been similarly overlooked: one at the Houghton Library of Harvard University, bMS Eng 265. 1. (23); one in the Osborn collection in the Beinecke library at Yale University, file S, 14133; and one in the Southey papers at the University of Rochester, A.S. 727. Box I. There may be other letters to Locker elsewhere, though a search through Southey's extensive extant correspondence has failed to discover any. Southey's biographers seem to be unaware of his acquaintance with Locker; the correspondence therefore adds significantly to our knowledge of the author's life. All thirteen letters are presented in their chronological sequence below, although not quoted in full; material familiar from Southey's published correspondence has been summarized in brackets.' Edward Hawke Locker was a career civil servant. He entered the naval pay office as a clerk in 1795 at the age of eighteen. He was undersecretary to the Board of Control for India and on the Board of Naval Enquiry, and then became civil secretary to Sir Edward Pellew, Lord Exmouth, between 1804 and 1814, serving in the East Indies, the North Sea, and the Mediterranean.2 He spent the year 1815 in England, where he married Eleanor Boucher of Coldale Hall, near