1813: The Year of the Laureate

Abstract

By most appearances, 1813 was a good year for the Poets sometimes dubbed the Lake School. A winter night in late January saw the Drury Lane triumph of Samuel Coleridge’s Remorse, which, running twenty nights, set a record for the longest-running tragedy of the still-young nineteenth century. Just as Coleridge’s play was winding down its run, William Wordsworth was receiving welcome spring news in the form of the office of Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland and Penrith, a government office made possible through the patronage of William Lowther, Earl of Lonsdale. And where spring bestowed one office, summer held out another prospect of another with the August death of Henry James Pye, Poet Laureate since 1790. Robert Southey had to wait for autumn for the offer of that position to materialize, but with October nearing its end he was duly sworn in, his borrowed court dress and chapeau-bras making him feel like, as he put it, a character in “the last scene of a pantomime.”³

Bob Southey! You’re a poet—Poet-laureate,

And representative of all the race;

—Lord Byron, “Dedication” to Don Juan²