Reviews for Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution

The average rating for Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-05-15 00:00:00 Stefanie Gladysz How should one consider Robert Southey. A poet who lived in the Lake District, rather than one of the Lake Poets? A writer with an ability to produce inspirational work, or a hack who would churn out almost anything to make a living? In this biography the author tends to point towards a hard-working journalistic hack and sometime poet who chose to live in Keswick. I have to admit that I have never read any of Southey's works, which makes me the wrong person to form any judgement on his literary talent. However, on the basis of Professor Speck's account one does see a young man pressured to see himself as part of the British gentry yet from a family a little short of cash. Intelligent - certainly; erudite - certainly; politically - excitable and radical when young, a stalwart conservative in later years (when he had accumulated an income and social position worth conserving); witty - well, playfully humorous with his children, otherwise too prolix by nature to tell a decent joke. He was a man who needed to be married and probably wanted lots of children. If only he could maintain a steady income from the one thing he was good at: writing. From this biography I have to feel sorry for his wife, Edith. She is brought across as a figure consigned to the background, looking after Southey, looking after the house, looking after anyone Southey cared for or took pity on, producing babies at frequent intervals. Apart from the babies she seems more a housekeeper than a wife. Even with their final illnesses, probably forms of dementia or Alzheimer's struck them both, the author reduces Edith to a shadowy and quite lonely figure quietly declining despite Southey's best efforts, while Robert ends being visited and mourned as a significant loss to local as well as literary society by a wide circle of friends and relations for several years before he bows out. This is a well written and thoughtful biography of a man I ended feeling that he is now as well known as he deserved to be: in the shadow of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Byron, yet Poet Laureate and probably aware that becoming a part of the political Establishment through and through had a lot to do with his elevated position.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-12-03 00:00:00 Natasha Dawdy This is a very well researched and very well written book. If I give it four stars instead of five it it because the life of Southey isn't that riveting - except for his later years. It is is wonderful to read a book that has been so thoroughly researched and which contains such comprehensive notes. I've read it twice.