Through Spanish eyes: Robert Southey's double vision in Letters from England: by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (1807)

In Letters from England, written ostensibly from Don Manuel Espriella to his family at home in Spain, Southey declares he will also incorporate ‘what I think respecting this country and these times’ (‘Letter to Charles Watkin Williams Wynn’). One of the aspects of society that concerned Southey was the state of the labouring classes and the detrimental effect of industrialisation on rural life. His Spanish tourist, who is ‘bigoted to his religion, and willing to discover such faults and such symptoms of declining power here as may soothe or gratify [his] natural inferiority’, makes a comparative study of the treatment of the poor in England and Spain (‘Letter to Charles Watkin Williams Wynn’). Espriella comments negatively on the growth of manufacturing industries, the effects of the enclosure acts, and the migration of rural communities to the cities. He suggests that the English nation has lost its once stable social order, when landowners and religious institutions felt a moral obligation for the welfare of the peasantry. And, despite Southey’s antipathy towards the Catholic faith after his visits to Spain (in 1795–6 and 1800–1), he states Espriella’s conviction that shared religious belief is a cohesive force that binds hierarchical society together. With the help of his Spanish alter-ego, Southey invokes an idealised, English feudal past to oppose contemporary legislative solutions to rural poverty, such as workhouses and poor laws. Espriella’s reverence for ancient historical sites, his criticism of commercialism, and his concern that new religious sects will imperil the religious and social order, would seem to belie his nationality and his youth. However, they complement Southey’s argument that the treatment of the rural poor is one more symptom of how far England has travelled from its Arcadian past. In this article, the ‘double vision’ of Letters from England is examined to demonstrate how Southey interweaves the observations of his European commentator into the British social politics that he seeks to present.