Colloquies on Society

It was in 1824 that Robert Southey, then fifty years old, published “Sir Thomas More, or Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society,” a book in two octavo volumes with plates illustrating lake scenery.  There were later editions of the book in 1829, and in 1831, and there was an edition in one volume in 1837, at the beginning of the reign of Queen Victoria.

These dialogues with a meditative and patriotic ghost form separate dissertations upon various questions that concern the progress of society.  Omitting a few dissertations that have lost the interest they had when the subjects they discussed were burning questions of the time, this volume retains the whole machinery of Southey’s book.  It gives unabridged the Colloquies that deal with the main principles of social life as Southey saw them in his latter days; and it includes, of course, the pleasant Colloquy that presents to us Southey himself, happy in his library, descanting on the course of time as illustrated by the bodies and the souls of books.  As this volume does not reproduce all the Colloquies arranged by Southey under the main title of “Sir Thomas More,” it avoids use of the main title, and ventures only to describe itself as “Colloquies on Society, by Robert Southey.”