1376.1. Robert Southey to Richard Duppa [fragment], [c. late 1807]*
No rumour ever reached me of your conversion to the Thirty Nine Articles. 1 Nor if it had should I have given any credit to it I suppose it not impossible that you may find Oxford a better place in point of society than undergraduates find it – For them the society differs only from what they just left at school in the addition of some decorum a few formalities & the advantage of a degree in debauchery.
Notes
MS: the letter survives only in a partial transcript in the hand of Henry Crabb
Robinson and made by him in ‘July 1858’, Dr Williams’s Library, London, Crabb Robinson
MSS. TR; 1p. The letter was possibly amongst the
letters from Southey to Duppa that Robinson was given by Duppa’s niece, Mrs Stone,
in January 1844, see Henry Crabb Robinson
on Books and their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley, 3 vols (London, 1938), II, p. 640.
Unpublished.
Dating note:
dated ‘1810’ by Robinson, but this is clearly in error as the content suggests this
was written shortly after Duppa announced his
intention of studying at Oxford. He matriculated at Trinity College, Oxford on 9 November
1807 and this letter probably dates from
about that time. Back
1. Duppa had decided to become a student at Oxford University. He matriculated at Trinity College, Oxford on 9 November 1807, a step which required him to declare his allegiance to the thirty nine articles of religion on which the Church of England was founded. Back