My fifth chapter extends my investigation of how epic could facilitate the imagining of a coordination of evangelism and imperialism and also provide, through tensions inherent in the genre, space to critique of the developing ideology of Christian imperialism. I examine Robert Southey’s Madoc as a cautious depiction of Christian conversion: even as Southey regards it as uplifting and beneficial, he expresses wariness about evangelism’s potential to sanction injustice. Conveying the remnants of Southey’s misgivings about the tyrannical potential of established religion, along with his suspicion about the overly enthusiastic zeal of many missionaries, Madoc traces similarities between Christians and non-Christians as a technique to affirm colonial authority, even as it strives to contain the tensions summoned by this strategy. Through his revisions of the epic genre, Southey advocates a need continuously to reform Christianity, empire, and epic, and so continuously to purge them of a tyrannous potential that he believed accompanied them.

Byron's satire of Robert Southey's Vision of Judgment, a Poet Laureate elegy and political settling of scores, upends Southey's Tory preening with liberal political satire, but also supplements this anti-type with unexpected twinning, especially against the unnamed figure of pure principle, the pseudonymous Junius.

This chapter discusses the continuities and contrasts between ‘Romantic Gothic’ and ‘Victorian medievalism’, focusing on the figures of Robert Southey and William Morris. Bringing together the perspectives developed in Morris’s conservationist activities with the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and his utopian romance, and Southey’s ‘black letter’ works of 1817, it argues for the early and late nineteenth-century presence of an alternative ‘history of the Gothic’. This is Gothic as what Morris called a ‘style historic’, articulated either side of the 1840s and the rise of historicism in architecture and ‘medievalism’ in literature. Where Morris ultimately chose a harder-edged Nordic ‘Gothic’ over the ‘maundering medievalism’ of Tennyson and Rossetti, Southey consistently avoided the category, despite being present at its inception with his review of the 1817 work in which the word ‘medieval’ first appeared. Revising received critical and semantic histories of ‘Gothic’ being subsumed by the medieval, the chapter explores the articulation and the ongoing significance of a more granular, aphasic and rhizomatic approach to the art and culture of the Middle Ages.