Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851

A portal into the literary culture of 1851, this issue of Harper's opens with an extraordinary gift: an intimate memoir of Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate of England, written by his own son. Here is the great Romantic not as monument, but as man - we see him in his study, in his garden, wrestling with the particular loneliness of a poet who has outlived his powers. The son recounts his father's habits, his conversation, his domestic tenderness, the quiet sadness of those final years when Southey could no longer write. What emerges is a portrait of literary fame stripped of its glory, revealing instead the ordinary human griefs that attend a life devoted to language. Beyond this centerpiece, the volume offers the curious reader a cross-section of what educated Americans were reading and thinking in the winter of 1851: essays on culture, criticism, and the personalities who shaped the literary imagination of the age. For anyone drawn to the Romantics, to Victorian literary culture, or to the intimate genre of poet-as-seen-by-his-child, this issue preserves a small, irreplaceable treasure.