Southey, Robert
Wat Tyler A Dramatic Poem. In Three Acts. Printed for Sherwood, Neely and Jones, 1817. 8vo, full calf; pp. [i-v (seemingly lacking iii-iv)], vi-xi, [1 (blank], [1]-70, [38 (inserted blanks with laid-in extracts from contemporary newspapers on the affair)]; provenance: "Ex bibliotheca Car. I. Taboris" (bookplate on upper pastedown of the surgeon SIr Thomas Anwyl-Davies (1891-1971) who was a lecturer in venereal diseases at St. Thomas's). Pirated first ed.
Robert Southey was in 1817 a Respectable Man of politics, a Tory and Poet Laureate his voice was the voice of Christian Family Values. It was then something of an embarrassment to him, and to the government of which he was a mouthpiece, when Radical publishers Sherwood, Neely and Jones produced a pirated edition of young firebrand Robert Southey's dramatic poem on Wat Tyler, the very slightly controversial leader of the Peasants' Revolt. Against a backdrop of politically motivated domestic spying, the suspension of Habeas Corpus, pilloried publishers, and penal suppression of Radical ideologies this embarrassment quickly became farce after the Hon. William Smith, Member for Norwich, demanded government action on this seditious literature. With literary war being waged between the Edinburgh Review (Whig) and the Quarterly Review (Tory), and injudicious support offered by fellow Radical apostate Coleridge, Southey sought to head off the entire affair with a swift literary injunction. This seemingly cast-iron control mechanism would only serve to make the entire affair worse.

The injunction was an author's only real defence against piracy at the time, owing to the tenuous status of copywrite under the Statute of Anne. By intention, an injunction was only a temporary hold until legal status as "property" could be proved. The cost of such proceedings was generally such that defendants simply ceased publication, making the injunction a de facto judgement. However, the law allowed no action in defence of works deemed to be injurious to the State - no one should profit from their crimes, least of all sedition. The delightful irony of the entire legal case was to ensure there was no legal bar whatsoever to Radical publications of the poem (similar situations would ensue from Byron's Cain and Shelley's Queen Mab). The deprivation of literary property rights did not in fact, shockingly enough, prevent people from publishing, much to the court and government's dismay. Not least injurious to the Tory faction was the serious blow to Southey's reputation from a dismissal by his own government, represented by the presiding Lord Chief Justice, Lord Eldon. The case, and the poem, highlighted the difference between Southey the Poet and Southey the Poet Laureate (not missed by Byron in the "Dedication" to Don Juan). The Poet Laureate held his authority not from the Muses, nor from the popular acclaim of the crowd, but from the Crown. The position's aspects as poet-for-hire and channel for Royal attitudes were laid bare - here was the Poet Laureate Southey decrying the Poet Southey whose verse had won him the position. Southey effectively wiped himself out, abnegating his own identity to better inhabit his current role.

In the end, the quality or significance of the verse itself was unimportant. This pirate edition laid bare hypocrisies at the heart of the Tory party and the governmental system they espoused; it branded Southey for ever a literary turncoat, a traitor to his Muse; it revealed the failure of the mechanisms of literary suppression; and it exposed serious fault lines between the Romantic poets in age and in youth.