This book is about one of the most popular writers of one of the most studied eras of English literature. Described as ‘the only existing entire man of letters’, Robert Southey was a writer whose very variety led, during the twentieth-century professionalization of literary criticism as an academic discipline, to his disappearance from the scholarly map. Neither a ‘prophet of nature’ in the Wordsworthian mould, nor an architect of the Victorian novel in that of Eliot, Southey fitted into no critic's ‘great tradition’. Yet in his own mind, it was ‘the man of letters’ – the writer professional in many genres – who truly commanded the cultural field. He considered the implications of his role in a journal article of 1808:

As the central repository for all the ‘treasure’ of knowledge in the world, Southey allocates himself a position of supreme importance. The ‘exploits’ of history are for his ‘amusement’, and for his benefit ‘adventurers’ explore the world. Even planetary events are for his ‘speculation’. Southey creates an impression of the world's vastness and historical longevity, in order to put himself at its centre and remind readers of his prominent role in early nineteenth-century British culture.