© 2004 by Oxford University Press
Madoc, 1795: Robert Southey's Misdated Manuscript
Queen Mary College, University of London *
In spring 1795, as his dream of Pantisocracy, along with his friendship with Coleridge, was slowly collapsing, Southey began work on Madoc, the epic which was eventually published in 1805. Forced by personal circumstances to abandon composition after one and a half books, when Southey returned to Madoc in February 1797, he began afresh. The manuscript of this early fragment has survived, however, and in 1943, shortly before it passed into the possession of the British Library, it was published by Kenneth Curry in Philological Quarterly. Curry dated the fragment to summer 1794, a dating which the British Library cataloguers and all subsequent critics have accepted without question. There is overwhelming evidence, however, that Southey did not begin work on Madoc until the following spring (1795). This article not only correlates that evidence, but also discusses the importance of relocating the initial composition of the poem away from that ‘summer of Pantisocracy’ to a period when Southey's intense relationship with Coleridge was disintegrating, and when a number of other biographical circumstances had combined to produce a personal crisis in his life. Finally, the article also corrects a number of Curry's misreadings, partly by comparing the British Library manuscript with that of Southey's first completed draft of Madoc (written between February 1797 and July 1799), which is now in the Keswick Museum and Art Gallery, Cumbria.
* My acknowledgements are due to the Bodleian Library, the British Library, the Houghton Library at Harvard, and the Keswick Museum and Art Gallery for permission to quote from manuscripts in their possession. Dr Andrew Lincoln of my own college and Dr Lynda Pratt of the University of Nottingham both read drafts of this article, and I have benefited from their comments.