Through Spanish Eyes: Robert Southey's Double Vision in Letters from England: By Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (1807)

Abstract

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 welfa...