“For I would, while my voice is heard on earth, / Bear witness to thy genius and thy worth.”
SOUTHEY, Robert. All for Love; and The Pilgrim to Compostella. Paris: A & W Galignani. 1829.
24mo. Contemporary straight-grained red roan, covers with gilt- and blind-tooled border and central lozenge, flat spine gilt in compartments with gilt black morocco lettering-piece, speckled edges, corners of board-edges roll-tooled in gilt; pp. [6], 159, [1 (blank)], with half-title; corners, upper joint, and spine ends lightly worn, a few small scuffs to rear board at head; light spotting throughout (heavier to first and final leaves); a very good copy; neat early ownership inscription ‘Annette Newton, Paris’ to front free endpaper.
A delightful and very rare Parisian edition of Southey’s two late narrative poems, published in the same year as the first,
dedicated to his ‘dear friend, […] sister Poetess’ and future wife, Caroline Bowles, our copy in a charming contemporary binding.
Robert Southey (1774–1843), with his friends Wordsworth and Coleridge was, during the revolutionary 1790s, something of a radical spirit. With Coleridge, he devised the idealistic and never-realised scheme of pantisocracy, an imagined egalitarian settlement in North America. Like them, however, he grew more conservative with age, and in 1813 was appointed Poet Laureate, a post he held until his death thirty years later.
This attractive and uncommon little volume – more often encountered in its John Murray edition issued the same year – was among Southey’s final poetic works and appears to have been animated by his growing attachment to the poet Caroline Bowles. The book is dedicated to her with a twelve-line poem, located and dated ‘Keswick, 21 Feb. 1829’, which prompted Bowles to write to Southey of ‘a sense of deep unworthiness, a gush of tears, and an inward prayer to become more worthy of such friendship.’ Southey claimed his intention was merely to bring Bowles’ name as a poet before a wider public (she is addressed as his ‘dear friend, and sister Poetess’), but the dedication reads unmistakably as a love poem. They were married ten years later, two years after the death of Southey’s first wife.
‘All for Love’ (not to be confused with Dryden’s play) and ‘The Pilgrimage to Compostella’ were both commissioned for literary annuals (where, for different reasons, neither appeared). In mid-February 1828, Charles Heath, publisher of The Keepsake, travelled to the Lake District to commission contributions from its distinguished residents, offering Wordsworth one hundred guineas for five short poems and Southey fifty for a single long one (Coleridge was also enlisted). ‘I sold him,’ Southey explained in a letter to his friend Allan Cunningham (24 February 1828), ‘a ballad-poem entitled “All for Love, or a Sinner well Saved”, of which one-and-twenty stanzas were then written. I have added fifty since, and am only half-way through the story. It is a very striking one […].’ The poem outgrew the limits of the commission and was replaced by two shorter pieces. ‘The Pilgrimage to Compostella’, written a few weeks later for Cunningham’s annual, The Anniversary, was omitted by the publisher, who feared it might prevent the annual from selling in Roman Catholic circles.
Both poems recall Southey’s early experiments with the narrative ballad with Wordsworth and Coleridge. Their subject matter is drawn from Iberian Catholic legend and miracle, to which Southey was clearly drawn while regarding the stories as mere superstition. Reserving his more explicit anti-Catholic polemic for his prose works, the poems invite the reader to suspend disbelief and engage with the narratives on their own terms. ‘All for Love’ tells the story of a young suitor who sells his soul to the devil to win his bride, eventually escaping through the intercession of St Basil. Its companion piece relates the fate of a young pilgrim executed for a theft he did not commit; miraculously immune from death, he is saved when the judge who condemned him is punished when the roast chickens he eats spring back to life. The volume was well received, The Monthly Review praising ‘All for Love’ as ‘an admirable poem,’ asserting that ‘both in invention and pathos’ it placed Southey higher ‘in the rank of poets […] than any of his former productions’.
Southey clearly had readers abroad, as evidenced by this uncommon Parisian pocket edition, published the same year as the London edition by Jules Didot, founder of the Royal Printing House in Brussels and inventor of round-edged initials, for the Galignani brothers. The Galignanis, noted publishers of English books for the continental market, sometimes paid authors for advance sheets (and sometimes not). In 1826, Sir Walter Scott recorded a visit to their Parisian premises – their ‘old pirate’s den’ – emerging, ‘after some palaver’, with an offer of one hundred guineas for sheets of his Life of Napoleon.
OCLC finds copies at the Royal Danish Library, British Library, and Bibliothèque nationale de France only. No copies traced in the US.
See Fulford et al, eds., Southey, Later Poetical Works, 1811–1838 IV (2024); Dowden ed., The Correspondence of Robert Southey and Caroline Bowles (1881).
SKU: 2124369