The Life of Nelson

Robert Southey (1774-1843), Romantic poet and friend of Coleridge, was Poet Laureate from 1813 to 1843. He also wrote historical works and was a noted scholar of Portuguese. (His three-volume history of Brazil is also reissued in this series.) As Southey himself states, many lives of Nelson had been written since the hero’s death at Trafalgar in 1805, but what he is attempting in these two volumes, published in 1813, is a work ‘clear and concise enough to become a manual for the young sailor … till he has treasured up the example in his memory and in his heart’. In this ‘eulogy’, Volume 1 describes Nelson’s boyhood and early experience of the sea, his service on both sides of the Atlantic and in the Arctic, his uneasy relationship with the Admiralty, and his role in the Napoleonic Wars up to the battle of the Nile.