Coleridge, Revision and Romanticism: After the Revolution, 1793-1818 (Continuum Literary Studies)

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Coleridge, Revision and Romanticism

Continuum Literary Studies Series Related titles in the series: Coleridge and German Philosophy by Paul Hamilton Romanticism, Literature and Philosophy by Simon Swift

Coleridge, Revision and Romanticism After the Revolution, 1793–1818

Ve-Yin Tee

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704 11 York Road New York London SE1 7NX NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Ve-Yin Tee 2009 Ve-Yin Tee has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-1-8470-6597-1 (hardback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group

To my parents, Tua Ba and Adelene. It was because of their unwavering support that even at the roughest spots, there was never any question that I would see this through one day.

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Contents

Acknowledgements List of Figures List of Abbreviations Introduction 1. 2. 3. 4.

The Catholicity of ‘Frost at Midnight’ The Submerged History of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ Ungodly Visions A Tale of Remorse

viii ix x 1 16 42 80 103

Conclusion

138

Notes Bibliography Index

143 164 173

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I would like to acknowledge the sheer intellectual rigour of John Barrell under whose supervision this project first came to life at the University of York. I had started out with only a vague idea of what I wanted to do, and I cannot overemphasize how much I have gained from the community that I found at York. I am particularly grateful to Gregory Dart, Rosie Dias, Jack Donovan, Harriet Guest, David Higgins, Jon Mee, S. P. Ong, Andrew Radford, Ted Royle, James Watt and Simon White for their commentary and encouragement. I wish to thank the patient listeners of the very earliest portion of my work at the University College Cork conference Around 1798: Romanticism and Ireland (1998). It was there that I met J. C. C. Mays, who gave me an insight into editing work, and Timothy Webb, who has helped sharpen my thinking on Romantic Irishness. I must also mention the advice that I received from Kenneth R. Johnston, the late Paul Magnuson and David Vallins, who I had the fortune of meeting at the Coleridge Summer Conference of 1998. It is in Nagoya, Japan, that I have matured as an academic and this is in no small part due to the company I have had the honour of falling in with: Susan K. Burton, Kimberly Engber, Toru Hanaki, Megumi Hashimoto, Andriy Ivanchenko, Michael O’Sullivan, William F. Purcell, Elisabeth Richards, Tatsuya Suzuki, Takakazu Yamagishi and Motoyasu Yamazaki. Chapter 1.1 is a modified version of an article I originally published in the NUCB Journal of Language, Culture and Communication. The last stages of this project benefited enormously from the Nanzan University Pache Research Subsidy I-A-2 for the 2008 academic year. I must mention the kind assistance of Masahisa Ishida who helped ensure my successful application. Finally, I would like to thank Colleen Coalter of Continuum for her indefatigable professionalism.

List of Figures

New Morality, 1 August 1798 (engraving) by James Gilray. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library (T900.c.58).

17

‘Frost at Midnight’, 1798–1829 (poem) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The published versions of the most heavily revised passage in the poem collated.

29

Figure 3.1 The Holy Family, 1800 (engraving) by William Sharp after the painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved (5.i.2–9).

81

Figure 1.1

Figure 1.2

Figure 3.2

Prince Hal and Poins Surprise Falstaff with Doll Tearsheet, 1805 (engraving) by William Bromley after the painting by Henri Fuseli. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved (80.f.8–17).

84

Spectres Visiting John Bull, 23 February 1808 (engraving) by John Williams. © Trustees of the British Museum.

101

Mrs. Siddons as Euphrasia, 1797 (engraving) by De Wilde. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved (2304.c).

119

‘The most frequently acted mainpieces in London between 1776 and 1800’, 1968 (statistics) by Charles Beecher Hogan for The London Stage 1660–1800, 5 vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1968), V, pp. clxxi–clxxii.

120

Theatre Royal, Drury Lane . . . Remorse, 23 January 1813 (Playbill). © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved (Playbills.46–76, 127–133).

124

Theatre Royal, Drury Lane . . . Bertram, 9 May 1816 (Playbill). © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved (Playbills.46–76, 127–133).

125

Figure 4.5 Theatre Royal, Drury Lane . . . Remorse, 28 January 1813 (Playbill). © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved (Playbills.46–76, 127–133).

126

Figure 3.3 Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2

Figure 4.3

Figure 4.4

List of Abbreviations

AR (CC)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, ed. John Beer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993)

BL (CC)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983)

BM

British Museum

BT

The British Theatre; or, a Collection of Plays, ed. Elizabeth Inchbald, 25 vols. (London: Longman, 1808)

CC

The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, general ed. Kathleen Coburn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969–2002)

CCH

Coleridge: The Critical Heritage, ed. J. R. de J. Jackson, 2 vols. (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970; London: Routledge, 1991)

CL

Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–1971)

CN

The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 4 double vols. (London: Routledge, 1957–1990)

DNB

Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, 22 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949–1950)

EOT (CC)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Essays on His Times, ed. David V. Erdman, 3 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978)

ESTC

Eighteenth-century Short Title Catalogue

Friend (CC)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend, ed. Barbara Rooke, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969)

List of Abbreviations

xi

Lects 1795 (CC)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1795: On Politics and Religion, ed. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971)

LL

The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. Edwin W. Marrs, 3 vols. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975–1978)

London Stage

The London Stage 1660–1800, ed. Charles Beecher Hogan, 5 vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968)

LS (CC)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972)

ML

The Letters of Thomas Moore, ed. Wilfred S. Dowden, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969)

OED

The Oxford English Dictionary, ed. James A. H. Murray, 2nd ed. revised by John A. Simpson and Edmund S. Weiner, 20 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)

PW (CC)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poetical Works, ed. J. C. C. Mays, 3 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)

SW & F (CC)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shorter Works and Fragments, ed. H. J. Jackson and J. R. de J. Jackson, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995)

TT (CC)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk, ed. Carl R. Woodring, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990)

Watchman (CC)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Watchman, ed. Lewis Patton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970)

WL

Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd edn revised by Chester L. Shaver, Alan G. Hill and Mary Moorman, 8 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967–1993)


Introduction

This book examines a handful of writings that Samuel Taylor Coleridge produced in the 1790s in response to the French revolution, as well as the changes that he made to them in the early decades of the nineteenth century. This book has been indelibly shaped by the long-running Bollingen Coleridge, in particular J. C. C. Mays’s The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poetical Works (2001) that amends what was felt to be an embarrassing lack in modern Coleridge studies: the fact that before Mays’s edition students of the poetry were largely dependent on Ernest Hartley Coleridge’s The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a publication from the Edwardian era. Whereas critics in the field had relied on Coleridge’s grandson for much of the twentieth century, since 2001 they have almost without exception turned to Mays’s edition. I think there should be more scrutiny of the implications of this epochal change above and beyond the two lines of enquiry that I have chosen to conduct here: an illumination of the ideological investment underpinning Mays’s collection of Coleridge’s poetical works and the position of my own critical intervention in the field.1 Six books totalling 4,000 pages constitute the final instalment to the Bollingen Coleridge; given its scale and importance, I must say that I had expected a far more wide-ranging assessment from Mays. As it stands, the edition is laid out in such a way as to facilitate our use of it and little else. Mays says he has no ‘major’ textual discoveries to announce, but this should not have led to the obviation that has occurred of signposting new texts or variants. He says he has no new perspective to offer on Coleridge, but even so some indication of the approach that he subscribes to or insight into his editing principles would have been helpful. On the one occasion when he does move beyond a purely functional treatment, it is to provide this emotionally charged, self-deprecatory appeal to our sympathies: Though an editor works to exclude the assumptions of a particular time, and to subordinate temperamental preferences to the author-artist he is attempting to serve, his efforts show up as limiting and intrusive, and thereby increasingly a distraction, even as they become apparent. One can be committed to

2

Coleridge, Revision and Romanticism presenting an author on his or her own terms and know that the result will hardly survive a generation. Then the job will have to be done again. (PW (CC), I, p. lxxxii)

I am uncomfortable with the general tenor of these statements, which evoke that kind of Romantic fatalism where what is overtly monumental declares itself to be flawed or fragmentary. The problem with this stance is that it not only says very little – I mean, anything drawn into relation with the greater macrocosm of Time and Space is going to appear temporary and partial – but it is also often employed as a tactic to avoid saying anything at all. What, for example, are the ‘assumptions’ or ‘temperamental preferences’ or ‘efforts . . . limiting and intrusive’ that Mays is anxious to avoid but sometimes finds that he cannot? He speaks of ‘a particular time’ and ‘generation’, but from which time and to which generation? The locality and the politics that are hinted at in the passage are never spelt out; indeed, further enquiry is hardly encouraged by the suggestion that the very editorial intervention that these factors condition is intrinsically trivial. As Mays would have it, his edition is simply another doomed attempt at ‘presenting an author on his or her own terms’ – this is all we know and all we need to know. Be that as it may, it is not something that I can agree with at all. First, why should editors seek to present ‘an author on his or her own terms’ anyway? If anyone wants to read ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ as Coleridge originally intended it to be read, he or she could go to the British Library and look the poem up in the Lyrical Ballads of 1798. Second, I do not perceive the interpolation that Mays portrays editors as inevitably performing as ‘a distraction’. After reading ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ in its original form, I can well imagine the same person going on to read the poem in a critical edition or even as fragments in a literary essay. I am sure I am not just speaking from my own experience when I say that this happens because ‘an author on his or her own terms’ is insufficient, if not downright alienating. I turn to critical editions and other secondary materials in order to appreciate an author from my very different place and time. I would go so far as to question the sincerity of Mays’s evaluation of his editorship for the Bollingen Coleridge. Projected for release since 1969, would his contribution have taken the form that it has if he had truly believed his work to be trivial? On the contrary, bearing in mind its historical and material circumstances, it is obvious that it must have been a labour of love. The ‘distraction’ is not his editing as Mays implies, but the emotionalism that he suddenly throws up to keep his cards close to his chest: for the reticence I have already noted in relation to the new edition’s locality and politics is actually endemic. Consider: Ernest Hartley Coleridge’s The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which served specialists so ubiquitously in the twentieth century, and which Mays’s edition was widely presumed to supersede, is not even mentioned.

Introduction

3

Consider: the simultaneous presentation of multiple versions of Coleridge’s poetry in the Variorum Text, which Mays is understandably proud of, is attributed to a textual practice that editors in Germany developed during the eighteenth century (PW (CC), I, p. lxxx)! In contrast to the scholarship that has been lavished on the editorial task, the historiography is lightweight. Which begs the question: why? I think Mays wants to steer clear of the ongoing re-evaluation of the relationship between author, text and reader that is destabilizing the very concepts behind the production of literary editions. The pioneer of this movement is James Thorpe,2 whose essay of December 1965 sharply questions the longstanding and generally accepted editorial practice of constructing a text based on the author’s final intentions. It is a bit puzzling to know why this dictum should for so long have passed unchallenged. For it is much like saying that an author’s last poem (or novel, or play) is, as a general rule, his best one; it may be, and it may not be.3 Authors revise their works creating multiple versions in manuscript and in print; instead of trying to choose a ‘best text’, Thorpe argues that their editors should treat everything that they wrote and made public as intrinsically valid and valuable: If one sees, side by side, five versions of a bronze head of Jeanne Vaderin ( Jeanette) by Henri Matisse – all distinctly different, each a new casting, yet all dating from 1910–1911 – one will perhaps have no serious hesitation about recognizing them as five different works of art. They have the same subject and many similarities – and so do the many finished self-portraits by Rembrandt – but they are readily recognizable as different works of art.4 Hans Zeller, a scholar who unlike Thorpe is actually involved in literary editing, adds credibility to the movement by demonstrating a similar scepticism at the need for single authoritative texts. In some literary works it is generally recognized that a revision may be so thoroughgoing – so motivated throughout by the author’s altered political, social, or artistic concepts – that the variants cannot be transferred and the editing of more than one version in parallel texts or in separate editions is required, because the later version represents an entirely new creative act . . . From a historical point of view the different versions are in theory of equal value. Each represents a semiotic system which was valid at a specific time . . . 5 This report, which Zeller provided his Anglo-American colleagues with in 1975, also attacks the application of Greg-Bowers principles – the dominant mode

4


then of determining single texts, by which scripts from different times were used to reconstitute an ‘ideal’ work – as historical ‘contamination’. Coleridge was an inveterate reviser, so it perhaps follows that this emphasis on the plurality of literary texts should rapidly establish a presence in the field. Meyer Howard Abrams’s remarkable essay on ‘The Eolian Harp’,6 a ‘reading . . . which’ – according to Kelvin Everest7 – ‘takes properly into consideration all the versions of the poem’ appeared in 1972. A book-length investigation of this kind just took two more years to materialize, that is, Coleridge’s Nightmare Poetry by Paul Magnuson. At this point it is important to note that while Thorpe and Zeller argue the importance of multiple texts from historical grounds, Abrams and Magnuson are interested in Coleridge’s revisions purely for what they reveal about his mind. For a historicist treatment that ‘takes properly into consideration all the versions’, we have to wait another five years – for Everest’s own book of 1979, Coleridge’s Secret Ministry. Everest’s work is a watershed in Coleridge studies; its accent on first or early versions embodies the direction that historical accounts in the field generally take during the 1980s, of which Jerome J. McGann’s ‘The Meaning of the Ancient Mariner’ is an outstanding example.8 Such an orientation should really be expected, coming on the backs of major editions on Byron and Wordsworth that heavily favour using an early manuscript or printing as the reading text. The editor of the former, none other than McGann himself, has produced two influential short studies during the period that essentially advocate the authority of the first edition.9 To quote McGann, ‘the presumption . . . lie[s] with the first edition since it can be expected to contain what the author and the publishing institution together worked to put before the public’.10 Stephen Maxfield Parrish, an editor with the Cornell Wordsworth project, demonstrates the same idea directly on Coleridge: through Coleridge’s Dejection (1988) that reproduces – as the subtitle proclaims – ‘The Earliest Manuscripts and the Earliest Printings’. The Bollingen Coleridge’s poetical works were originally scheduled for release around this time; had this been the case, we would have ended up with a very different edition: a more modest two-volume production.11 As it happened, Mays’s edition trails the 1980s when a backlash develops against this preference for early versions. In his landmark essay of 1989, Jack Stillinger caricatures editing procedures like Parrish’s as ‘textual primitivism’.12 Privileging an early or manuscript version ignores the people, materials and events that have co-produced and that continue to reproduce literary works. In other words, it is as distorting of historical realities as the last-textis-best approach: the logical course, according to Stillinger, is to ‘grant the legitimacy and interest . . . of all the versions’.13 This is a position that he returns to again and again during his rise as the major textual Romanticist of the 1990s.14 However, though his publications – with titles such as ‘The Multiple Versions of Coleridge’s Poems: How Many Mariners did Coleridge Write?’ (1992), Coleridge and Textual Instability (1994), etc. – suggest a committed indeterminist

Introduction

5

or pluralist, his editorial practice is surprisingly conservative. As Zachary Leader’s Revision and Romantic Authorship (1996) observes of the 1992 essay: Though Jack Stillinger argues for the independent and equal authority of all versions of Coleridge’s poems, if forced to pick single texts, ‘for example, in a standardized edition or in an anthology’, ‘the editorial choice of the latest texts may well be artistically justifiable; Coleridge, just like Wordsworth, seems to have been an amazingly shrewd reviser, and I think most critics would agree, even if they couldn’t logically defend their preferences, that the later versions are almost always richer, more complex, better structured, more pleasing aesthetically’.15 Stillinger’s book of 1994, after so eloquently laying into the faults of Ernest Hartley Coleridge’s 1912 edition, recapitulates – albeit more accurately – the Edwardian editor’s approach: presenting copy-texts based on later incarnations and footnoting the earlier variations. Coleridge and Textual Instability promotes ‘the existence and legitimacy of multiple versions’,16 yet – as the author himself acknowledges – adopts a textual apparatus that contributes ‘to the reinforcement of . . . the single-text ideal’.17 Nonetheless, Stillinger is basically unapologetic and defends his approach on two separate fronts: 1. Constructing one standard text for each of Coleridge’s poems is unavoidable ‘on the flat pages of a printed book’. 2. The work as a whole is sufficiently undermining of ‘the single-text ideal’, due to its democratic theoretical framework, which is backed up by ‘detailed descriptions . . . identifying and describing every recoverable version’ of the poems that it features. Considering the contemporaneous practice of presenting Wordsworth’s poetry in two versions across facing pages,18 Stillinger’s first point is extraordinary to say the least. This underestimation of print though is the direct result of works such as Peter Schillingsburg’s Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age (1986), which highlight the capability that we increasingly have in recent times to store and recall texts in multiple permutations electronically. Even so, a move towards hypertext construction would still be premature; considering the more recent innovations by Martin Wallen,19 and, of course, by Mays for the Bollingen Coleridge, which allow the presentation of Coleridge’s poetry in three or more versions simultaneously, I suspect that the possibilities for representing multiple texts ‘on the flat pages of a printed book’ have yet to be fully exploited. As for Stillinger’s second justification, it misses the wood for the trees. It is because critics have for too long and far too uniformly chosen single, late versions when editing literary texts (as Stillinger has done in Coleridge and Textual Instability)

6


that the issue of adequately reflecting the fact that texts exist in more than one version crops up in the first place. Stillinger’s conservative editing practice is especially regrettable in the light of his theoretical position on the multiplicity of literary works, which is the most progressive. Unlike Thorpe, for example, where a work has to undergo publication to be nominated as a version,20 he holds any change by the author – in manuscript, in a letter, in autographed copies of the work itself – to be legitimate: ‘the authority of any particular version lies not necessarily in the version itself but in someone’s arbitrary definition of what constitutes authority’.21 I will return again to this important statement; it is sufficient for now to note Thorpe’s emphasis on publication as to what constitutes a version, which is essentially Leader’s position as well: Nomination, of course, can take many subsequent forms, as in the decision to title or recopy or read out or reproduce in correspondence, but nowhere is it clearer or more emphatic than in publication. This is not to say that the mere fact of publication guarantees poetical nomination – the author in question, as Hans Zeller puts it, must have ‘desired or approved’ the production of his or her published texts, must have ‘influenced the texts by supplying the printer’s copy or by personal revision, or by revision undertaken at his request during the printing process’ – it is only to suggest that, with Zeller’s qualifications, no other moment more surely signals creative completion or birth, for Coleridge as for many other writers.22 Publication is a fundamentally historical act. It is through this ‘release . . . to his usual public’ that an author ‘makes . . . his work of art . . . ours’ (Thorpe),23 a dialectical process whereby the Self impinges on even as it is itself impinged upon by the Existence that is not the Self: ‘an author not only has an effect on his readers, he is in turn affected by their reaction’ (Zeller).24 Given the historical genesis of textual pluralism, and the historicist orientation of its prime movers (notably McGann and Stillinger), this link that Leader proposes between publication and textual authority has undeniable resonance. However, the position that he charts out on multiple versions is the narrowest and the most hierarchical of the textual pluralists. Not only has the published product authority over the unpublished one, also, according to him, between published versions, the more recent it is the greater its authority. So strident is his argument for this that in places he sounds like a single-text idealist. When editors privilege early, often manuscript, versions of texts, burying the contributions of collaborators (even in a bed of footnotes), they assume a thoroughly Romantic view of the relation between writers, works, publishers, and readers. Yet the indeterminist or pluralist backlash . . . is also Romantic, in that it undervalues secondary processes, the sort that ‘finish’ or ‘perfect’ works.25

Introduction

7

Leader would assert what Thorpe denies: ‘an author’s last poem (or novel, or play) is, as a general rule, his best one’. He would return us to pre-Thorpe editorial prerogatives with a greater awareness of multiple versions;26 he would leave us essentially at the ideological doorstep of Mays’s edition. In ‘Reflections on Having Edited Coleridge’s Poems’, an essay for Romantic Revisions (1992), Mays reveals: There was an uncomfortable interval when computer technology promised more than it could deliver, but the material is now (autumn 1989) in the state in which it would have been handed over to Bart Winer, if he were still alive. It will trickle onward through its processes – with further readers to check, copy-edit and design – and with luck might reach the bookstalls in 1992.27 Though the final instalment of the Bollingen Coleridge actually appears in 2001, there are numerous quotations from ‘the material’ that prove it may well have been completed as early as ‘autumn 1989’.28 In other words, the milieu of Stillinger and Leader is Mays’s as well. This is evident in the issues that he agonizes over in his essay: computer technology, the Cornell Wordsworth and Hans Zeller’s editing principles. It is also evident in the final shape of the Poetical Works. Consider: in the Reading Text volumes, where ‘one version simply must be chosen’, Mays follows Stillinger by privileging a late or final version.29 Consider: in the Variorum Text volumes, where multiple versions are presented, how he has followed Leader’s recommendations by selecting in almost all cases a published version as the base text.30 I first read Mays’s ‘Reflections’ in November 2004, three months after my withdrawal of the monumental books that he created for the Bollingen foundation. As a statement on his editing work, I was at once struck by the candidness of the 1992 essay. Revealing of his sources, alert to the editorial practices and theories of its day, it fills in so much of what the official ‘Editor’s Introduction’ would only hint at. As a matter of fact, this discrepancy is the inspiration behind my critique of Mays’s edition. Why – I was led to ask – does he obscure in one publication what he has seen fit to lay bare in another? Nine years separate the essay from the product that it advertises. Though the typescripts for Coleridge’s poetry might have been finalized in 1989, because of the long verification ‘processes’, there is no reason why he could not have continued to work on the introduction until as late as 1998 or 1999. If so, he would have found himself with the unenviable task of promoting a project to an age that is rapidly leaving behind what he has to offer. I contend that Mays’s later vagueness is finally a strategy to sidestep the insights of the late 1990s, which would uncover the very thing he fears about ‘the job’ that he has done: its datedness. The centrepiece of the Poetical Works is – in the words of Mays’s 1992 ‘Reflections’ – ‘the volume in the middle’, the supposedly German-inspired variorum that has the capacity to show ‘from three to a dozen texts’

8


simultaneously.31 ‘They are displayed’ – he claims in the later ‘Editor’s Introduction’ – ‘not as departures from a chosen norm, to which they have been subordinated, but as interrelated variants . . . [with] authority’ (PW (CC), I, p. lxxx). He also maintains ‘the material for each of the versions is there’ in such a way that ‘with practice’ whatever is required ‘can be read off’ (PW (CC), I, p. cxxii). Authoritative without being prescriptive, inclusive without seeking to be exhaustive, this ‘volume in the middle’ is a substantial effort in the spirit of pluralism championed by Thorpe and Zeller; Mays’s dénouement of the ‘claim that any particular version . . . represents the “idea” of a Coleridge poem’ as ‘frequently idle’ (PW (CC), I, p. lxxix) fairly resonates with them. The historicism supporting textual multiplicity has, unfortunately, left these pioneers behind. Inspired by the materialist speculations of Fredric Jameson and the challenge of the deconstructionists, attention has shifted toward the specific mediation between texts and their historical contexts that Magnuson’s Reading Public Romanticism (1998) subtly distinguishes as ‘the frame’: Alan Liu has pointedly remarked that ‘a New Historicist paradigm holds up to view a historical context on the one side, a literary text on the other, and, in between, a connection of pure nothing’. Reading the writing around a poem, reading the location, requires reading a particular version of a poem in the unique details of its publication, the material specificity of its utterance. The more precise one is about that particular utterance, the clearer the connections between text and context become . . . One must begin, not with the purely esthetic [sic], but with its boundaries, with the particular versions . . . and its paratext because there a poem’s connections to other utterances are to be found, often in abundance.32 The Bollingen Coleridge makes ‘the material . . . there’ only in the sense of providing ‘texts’. But the meaning of a text also lies outside itself, in relation to other texts, in specific locations of time and place, which Magnuson argues is encoded in ‘its paratext’. In his last book, for example, he convincingly re-reads ‘Frost at Midnight’ as a political poem by reconstructing its original situation as a companion piece to ‘Fears in Solitude’ and ‘France, an Ode’. Robert Keith Lapp’s Contest for Cultural Authority (1999) works in a similar vein; by focusing on such bibliographical details as the specific typography of the date that Coleridge affixed in 1816 to ‘Christabel’, Lapp is seemingly able to discern the very motives that the author had sought to hide.33 To those critics who would concern themselves with ‘the frame’, Mays’s edition of Coleridge’s poetry is irrelevant. For they would only be too conscious of the poems as, radically, not there: as ‘the material . . . there’ being Mays’s rather than Coleridge’s. This sea change reaches its striking culmination at the end of 1990s with Stillinger’s Reading The Eve of St. Agnes (1999) in which the raison d’être is no longer the multiplicity of ‘texts’, but of ‘readings’. Where he previously describes

Introduction

9

in Coleridge and Textual Instability 18 versions of ‘The Ancient Mariner’,34 for Reading The Eve of St. Agnes he outlines instead the 59 interpretations that 180 years of readers have so far produced for Keats’s iconic poem.35 Where 96 pages of Coleridge and Textual Instability is allocated to the ‘Texts and Apparatuses’, in Reading the Eve of St. Agnes only 16 are so assigned. Interestingly, Stillinger adopts for the 1999 book a ‘text . . . reproduc[ing] the wording and accidentals of the 1820 printing exactly . . . including [its] three clear errors’.36 Is this an attempt on his part to meet the current demand for ‘the frame’ of literary works? If so, as it stands, his is a zero-sum strategy: the editor must become smaller with every step that he chooses to take in this way towards the originating artefact. Besides, even if an editor were reduced to the writing of brief introductions to page-for-page facsimile reprints, or is done away with altogether in favour of creating virtual books, would the end result still be sufficiently the textual thing itself? Shortly after beginning this introduction, while waiting for the bus to school, I met another academic heading in the same direction. The stranger was a specialist of eighteenth-century Irish literature, and as it so happened, we were soon discussing research practices. This scholar spoke on the insights that could be attained from attending to such factors as the binding of the work we are studying, or the other texts it may be bound up together with, or found alongside with as part of a library collection. I worried aloud about how we, ostensibly left-leaning academicians, by focusing on ‘the frame’ are driving a research ethos that can only favour the elite universities and libraries. What does this approach imply for someone like myself, for example, a Singaporean specialist of English Romantic literature? To sustain this kind of historical standard, I would have to use one of these institutions: I must be in England to study its literature (or, at least, an overseas institution wealthy enough to have imported the necessary antiquarian resources). While ‘the frame’ is an undeniably important area for investigation, this push for ‘the material specificity of its utterance’ should not lead to the death of the editor. If every act of editing is an intervention,37 then, in an equally valid sense, so is every act of reading and every act of writing about what is read. I am now leafing through the Seven Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds that I own in its original 1778 form. Glancing over its wrinkled pages to stare into the screen of my laptop computer, why do I recall the 7,000 books of George III in that climate-controlled glass and steel structure at the British Library? However deeply we may choose to bury ourselves in the local historicity of a work, there always comes that point beyond which ‘the frame’ can only fall away and expose an alienated context. The way forward for editors does not lie with the production of simulacra, which ultimately demands the end of editing. No, once the futility of reaching ‘an author on his or her own terms’ is realized – that the original publication in our hands is also insufficient – the better alternative is to embrace the interventionism of editing itself. Using ‘the frame’ will provide a few steps into the ‘text’ it surrounds, but that is all. To proceed any further the

10


text and its ‘paratext’ must be read holistically and imaginatively, a task that the editor himself should perform in order to facilitate future acts of reading. With the awareness of multiple versions and by extension multiple frames, I would argue that the editor today has to do more rather than less for each and every ‘text’. As a recent overview of Stillinger’s books notes, [the] call for acknowledging all of the variations and the differences between them could cause momentary confusion for lazy readers who would not know how to construct the wholeness necessary to construct meaning, but since every reader comes to a text from a particular place, then that determinate location could determine which variant would dominate – and I feel that one should or would because readers need to make critical choices to make meaning. The choice of which to foreground would then be contextual. Is the poem being published in a textbook? An anthology? A collection of Coleridge’s poems?38 With the awareness of multiple readings and by extension multiple points of reception, I would argue that we in fact need multiple editors. Instead of monumental one-size-fits-all tomes, we require smaller and cheaper books that can be quickly produced to meet our specific and ever-changing purposes. To aid an enlightened consumption these editors should rigorously spell out their choices in such a way as to make their own locations, their very politics transparent. Literary scholars have worried over the motives of authors for almost two centuries; perhaps it is time we begin to put our own purposes under scrutiny by speaking of editorial – of critical intention. After all, do we really do what we do for an author of the past, or for readers of the present and the future? The death of the author, as argued by the deconstructionists, calls upon us to recognize the truth that he exercises no determinative hegemony over the scene of utterance: [T]he writer writes in a language and in a logic whose proper system, laws, and life his discourse by definition cannot dominate absolutely. He uses them only by letting himself, after a fashion and up to a point, be governed by the system. And the reading must always aim at a certain readership, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses.39 Literary investigation does not inevitably have to be a search for the author. What deconstruction disputes is not authorship per se, but its assumed centrality: this is a perception that can free us to do greater justice to the range of different forces at play.40 A brief perusal of my bibliography will reveal the extensive use of antiquarian source material. It is a practice that admittedly goes against the reservations

Introduction

11

that I have just expressed. I can only say in mitigation that when I began this book in 1997, I was facing Mays’s forthcoming Poetical Works: I felt I had to turn to the originals as a kind of insurance against the obsolescence of my own work. I was not alone in walking away from critical editions; actually, I suddenly found myself in rather crowded country. These denizens are in the main cultural materialists, who – I was pleased to discover – generally display a Magnuson-like facility with literary works as ‘material utterances’. Their ideas have since become mine. Cultural materialism too is in dispute with the centrality of authorship; when reading literature, materialists focus on the history. This is possible because the literary text is viewed as a manifestation of particular economic and ideological relations: it is a historical process fossilized.41 While I do not ignore the author as an agent in the formation of his work, he has been allotted a decayed sphere of influence in the sense I am not so much interested in the man himself as in him as a conduit for his times.42 The literary work results from overlapping fields of intention, both personal and institutional, of which the author’s is seldom the strongest or the most distinctive. Sigmund Freud’s enduring contribution to modern psychology was to suggest the role that immediate history plays in the creative process. Freud found ‘every dream . . . linked in its manifest content with recent experiences’. ‘Dreams can select their material from any part of the dreamer’s life’, but only on the condition ‘that there is a train of thought linking the experience of the dream-day’ – that is, the waking hours preceding the dream – ‘with the earlier ones’.43 We may infer from these words the idea of human memory as short-termed and unreliable, which in truth dooms any attempt to reach a coherent and unified intention. The heart of the matter is this: the author’s intention is itself founded upon circumstances that change with time. As a concept, it is implicit in current materialist approaches to ‘the frame’: after all, why be specific at all about the historical location of a literary work unless it is believed to be at some level synonymous with a dream work – ‘linked in its manifest content with recent experiences’? Thus it strikes me that, as an investigative strategy, cultural materialism is primarily synchronic. However, despite the fact that the movement has been stressing the need for greater historical specificity ever since Raymond Williams’s Marxism and Literature (1977), there still is no indication whatsoever as to the kind of chronological and socio-cultural differentials that we should be dealing with. For example, after noticing certain similarities between literary works A and B by two different authors, how do we tell whether these similarities are the result of a common background (e.g. B sharing the same historical location as A) or of one influencing the other (e.g. B imitating A)? In other words, when does the flow of history in which a literary product is embedded specifically become its context? When examining the resonances around literary works, two areas of concern are distinguished. The first has involved me searching up to one year in either direction around the moment of publication, where

12


I tend to interpret the similar manifestations that I find between two works (by two different writers) with reference to a third underlying factor or shared social characteristic. Of course, one historical phenomenon may directly give rise to another historical phenomenon. It is for these cases that I have conceived a second, wider zone of three years (i.e. three years before and three years after the moment of publication). Since it is possible for two phenomena less than a year apart to hold a causative relation – for instance, a newspaper article responding in a matter of days to another newspaper article – so this second zone overlaps to some extent with the chronological area of the first zone. The research and interpretation that I have pursued have been organized as far as possible around these guidelines and I would only suggest that they are not completely unreasonable. I settled on a plus-minus-one-year range for the first zone (i.e. of simultaneous development), because, in my experience of dealing with literary texts, I have found that two similar phenomena more than a year apart are far more likely to be demonstrative of straightforward influence than of synchronous development. As for the second zone, I have decided to work with a three-year range because the drawing together of two phenomena more than three years apart does not seem to me to be sufficiently an exercise in historical specificity. The first chapter of this book examines the relationship between Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’ and Catholic Emancipation, over which there was a broad consensus among political activists during the 1790s. Coleridge was radicalized by the events of the French Revolution, and his notebook entries at the time demonstrate a profound fascination with Catholicism. ‘Frost at Midnight’ is, however, also a catholic poem in the sense that it exists in multiple versions expressing markedly different perspectives. I read ‘Frost at Midnight’ as Coleridge published it in 1798, 1812, 1817 and 1829, to reveal his changing socio-ideological circumstances. To pursue a chronologically sensitive exegesis, rather than bringing the various versions into a diachronic relationship with each other, I have struggled instead to see each one as the necessary artefact of its own discrete context. In other words, I concentrate on the revisions that Coleridge made instead of the greater body of work that he chose to retain. This approach has yielded results that I think should best be described as mixed. I have had the most success teasing out the historical resonances of the first published version: a cursory glance through Chapter 1 will reveal that my analysis is there (i.e. Section 1.1) at its most extensive and precise. It is even possible to discern in my exegesis of the poem in its 1798 form how I have deployed the two-time-zone model that I have described. First, the private writings (e.g. Coleridge’s letters) and other easily forgettable ephemera (e.g. articles from daily newspapers) that I link to ‘Frost at Midnight’ are all within one year of its moment of publication. Given the short-term disposition of the human memory, I judged these texts as admissible only as evidence of synchronicity or of shortterm diachronic development. Second, I have searched up to three years before

Introduction

13

and after the publication date of the poem for connections to works of literature and other more memorable texts (e.g. a journal review of his poetry). There is, however, less evidence of the same fine historical discrimination on my part with respect to ‘Frost at Midnight’ in its later stages. This is particularly the case with the 1829 version, where my plumbing The Task – written half a century before – for resonances clearly departs from the two-time-zone model that I have set up. I had pursued various leads in an effort to nail a more immediate association, but there was just too little in what Coleridge produced that year for ‘Frost at Midnight’ for me to make enough stick.44 That my commentary on the first version of ‘Frost at Midnight’ should be the most copious has to be expected. At the point of its initial appearance, when the entire poem is of its time, there is simply so much more to work with. The same cannot be said for the poem in its later stages, where I have only the revised portions. I have tried to offset this limitation by coming up with a broader definition of revision that considers changes to ‘the frame’, such as changes in typography or sequence. Nevertheless, it is still the first version that commands the bulk of my analysis. In the end, it is to the permutation of words rather than their presentation that I am the more responsive: the more the author wrote, the more I myself could write. Once I realized this, it became clear that my second chapter had to be on a longer poem. Chapter 2 focuses on ‘The Ancient Mariner’, which is the obvious choice. With the exception of Christabel, Coleridge wrote no longer poem. As it is also one of his most revised poems, it gives me far more to comment upon. Then, there is the added bonus of an overlapping genetic history. Like ‘Frost at Midnight’, it originates in 1798; it is collected along with ‘Frost at Midnight’ in Sibylline Leaves, where – like ‘Frost at Midnight’ – it undergoes further revision. Reading ‘The Ancient Mariner’ would allow me to return to the historical location of ‘Frost at Midnight’ and – I hoped – a few of the issues that I have raised in Chapter 1. As it turned out, by separately interrogating three major versions of ‘The Ancient Mariner’, I have managed to provide the most historically specific reading of the poem that currently exists. The first version, published in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads, I connect to the working conditions of Britain’s seamen and their struggle for betterment through the two great mutinies at the Nore and Spithead. With the second version, published in the 1800 Lyrical Ballads, I reveal the influence reviewers had over the composition of the poem and Coleridge’s deteriorating relationship with Wordsworth. Finally, using the version that appeared in the 1817 Sibylline Leaves, I suggest that the prevailing view of Coleridge as someone who retreated in his later years into reactionary conservatism is too simplistic. Chapter 2 is also where the two-time-zone model is most consistently applied. In the way I have dealt with the poem’s well-known indebtedness to Milton and Shakespeare, a further refinement about this investigative strategy is discernable: historically distant literary sources do not have to be definitively excluded.

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Creative works are not wholly the compositions of their immediate contexts; even something as fleeting as dreams, according to Freud, ‘can select their material from any part of the dreamer’s life’. To be consistent with the idea of human memory as short-termed, however, Freud felt it incumbent upon the psychoanalyst to connect such occurrences with a more historically immediate referent – that is, to lay out the ‘train of thought linking the experience of the dream-day with the earlier ones’. My model is open to more distant influences on the same principle. That is to say, it is not completely impossible for the cultural materialist to uphold a resonance in a Romantic poem that stretches as far back as the Renaissance – indeed, he may select his materials from any part of history – but for maximum historical consistency, he should directly substantiate these observations with contemporaneous evidence. Consequently, for the Shakespearean resonances I consciously use or refer to the versions of Shakespeare’s works that Coleridge himself would have read or seen performed. This practice is observable as well in the beginning of Chapter 3, where I explore the Augustan sources of Coleridge’s ‘allegoric vision’ exclusively through their respective chronologically proximate materializations in the author’s letters and lectures. Chapter 3 extends the concept of multiple texts to Coleridge’s prose writings. Specifically, I look at the post-apocalyptic ‘vision’ that he wrote under three very different contexts. The first, which he used to open his 1795 lectures ‘on Revealed Religion its Corruptions and Political Views’, offers to an audience sympathetic to social reform the horrific image of a land dominated by the Anglican Church. The second, which Coleridge created for a government newspaper in 1811, does a 180-degree turn: the stuff of nightmares is a land where revolutionaries and those sympathetic to the plight of the Catholics have successfully overthrown the Anglican Church. To facilitate this transition, Coleridge’s revisions actually exceeded what he chose to retain from the 1795 version. Since his contribution to the work is at its greatest for the second version, my commentary is here the most extensive and detailed. As a result, reading Coleridge’s post-apocalyptic ‘vision’ has also enabled me to break with the bias of the previous two chapters towards first versions. The third version, which appeared in the introduction of Coleridge’s 1817 Lay Sermon . . . On the Existing Distresses and Discontents, strikes a compromise between the two earlier positions by imagining a land haunted by the legacy of Edmund Burke – the politician who notoriously left a reform-minded Whig party for a reactionary Tory government. The final chapter, Chapter 4, highlights the multiple versions of Remorse, a play that was performed at Drury Lane in 1813 and 1817. Thus, I carry on in the spirit of Chapter 3 by broadening this study of revision to yet another genre. The play was originally submitted to Drury Lane in 1797 as Osorio, and I show the extent to which Coleridge tried to take advantage of a contemporary preoccupation with Shakespeare’s Macbeth and the French Revolution. I have been

Introduction

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directed throughout by my two-time-zone model of historical consistency and specificity; literary resonances from chronologically distant sources, such as Shakespeare’s Macbeth are all strictly traced to a local counterpart: the text of Macbeth that was then used by Drury Lane, the actors and actresses there who would have been expected to bring the play to life, etc. Drury Lane, under Richard Brinsley Sheridan, however, rejected Osorio. The play was resubmitted in 1812 as Remorse, and under the very different management of Samuel Whitbread it proved to be one of the theatre house’s most successful productions. Coleridge’s revisions were extensive, and they prove beyond a doubt how different historical conditions literally demand different works. I show how Coleridge revised the play in order to make use of the new technological advances in stagecraft, as well as to satisfy an age that no longer craved tragedy but romance: the most admired work then of Shakespeare’s was Romeo and Juliet. The chapter concludes by considering the limitations of a purely textual approach to history. For instance, how do we deal with historical phenomena that leave no documentary footprint? With respect to Remorse, there is also the additional complication of a possible missing text: how do we take into account the missing links (if such exist) in the evolution of a text? With respect to the works of Coleridge, I am conscious of how this book lies more or less focused on the earlier stages of textual genealogy. While I have not committed myself to the pre-eminence of originating manuscripts or first published editions, it is still one or the other that has attracted the greater part of my commentary. Because of this, I might be perceived as a proponent of ‘textual primitivism’. If so then let me aver that, with respect to textual authority, I am utterly persuaded by Stillinger’s statement that ‘the authority of any particular version lies not necessarily in the version itself but in someone’s arbitrary definition of what constitutes authority’.45 The relative significance of a text is to a large extent externally determined: by the author, by his editors, critics and readers. Any one version of a text may be important for different reasons to different persons and different times. Besides, my book being skewed towards early versions does not obviate a more forward-looking project along the same historicist lines. Surely we can conceive of someone with a training less logo-centric than mine who is able to comment more fulsomely on ‘the frame’ of literary works? Similarly, can we also not conceive of a book more concerned than mine with the reception of Coleridge’s works by different times and different countries?46 I have acknowledged the backward-looking materialism of this book, including the problematic antiquarianism that my approach might encourage; I have adopted a methodology, in the pursuit of which I regret a few lapses;47 my purposes are clear, so are my misgivings; it now only remains for me to leave this project in the lap of the final arbiter in any literary transaction: the reader. If the Coleridge that emerges here is in any way new and unexpected, if the period in which he lived and acted has been made here any more visceral, then I have succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.

Chapter 1

The Catholicity of ‘Frost at Midnight’

1.1 Invasion and Subterfuge in ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1798) Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s letter of 10 March 1798 to George Coleridge (CL, I, pp. 394–398) is remarkable for several reasons. One of his longest letters for the year, it effectively ends what seems to be a three-and-a-half-year silence with his brother. He is responding to concerns about his political radicalism; given the distance between them, George’s ‘kind and interesting Letter’ must have been prompted by the recent appearance of Coleridge’s prose and poetry in the Morning Post. The Post was a prominent London newspaper opposed to the Tory government and the state of war with France. Coleridge’s act of addressing George’s concerns, then, is evidence that this profile caused uneasiness even in his private life. Publicly, Coleridge’s association with the Post elicited the opprobrium of the pro-government press. The most notorious of these attacks came in July, when a poem extending over six of the Anti-Jacobin’s eight pages labelled as sycophants of ‘LEPAUX’ the papers ‘Couriers and Stars . . . Morning Chronicle, and Morning Post’, and ‘five . . . wandering Bards’ named ‘C-----DGE and S—TH-Y, L---D, and L--BE and Co’.1 This work subsequently inspired a James Gillray caricature of the English radicals – New Morality (see Figure 1.1) – that was published in the first monthly issue of the Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine. The lines that I have highlighted were reprinted as part of the 40-line quotation at the bottom of the cartoon and the 36-line extract given in the magazine itself.2 Coleridge also appears in the caricature with long donkey ears proclaiming his ‘Dactylics’; of the ‘Bards’ only he and his friend Robert Southey (the kneeling ass) are visually distinguishable, indicating his status – in Tory eyes at least – as an important agent of the ‘Jacobin’ movement. On 28 May 1798, Coleridge had argued for ‘anonymous Publications’ with a telling justification: ‘Wordsworth’s name is nothing – to a large number of persons mine stinks’ (CL, I, p. 412). Literary scholarship has, logically enough, connected this well-known declaration with the anonymous publication on 4 October of the Lyrical Ballads. It does beg an interesting question however: why then did Coleridge put his name to the pamphlet of poems appearing at about the same time – Fears in Solitude?

The Catholicity of ‘Frost at Midnight’ Figure 1.1 New Morality, 1 August 1798 (engraving) by James Gilray. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library (T900.c.58).

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Fears in Solitude is a slim but elegant quarto volume containing, in addition to the poem ‘Fears in Solitude’, ‘France, an Ode’ and ‘Frost at Midnight’. Joseph Johnson published it, and, if we weigh the evidence, with some enthusiasm. Coleridge, writing to his wife in September, maintained that ‘Johnson, the Bookseller . . . purely out of affection conceived for me . . . gave me an order on Remnant at Hamburg for 30 pound’, but he went on to mention giving Johnson to print ‘in Quarto a little Poem’ of his (CL, I, p. 417). In his next letter to her, he told how ‘Johnson . . . who received me civilly the first time, cordially the second, affectionately the third . . . finally took leave of me with tears in his eyes’ (CL, I, p. 420). An exaggeration, perhaps, but Johnson’s generosity is striking considering the luxurious presentation of Fears in Solitude and the fact that Coleridge received £30 for just three poems.3 Johnson – the most famous radical publisher of the 1790s – was, like Coleridge, held in suspicion by the ruling establishment. The former had been convicted on 17 July for selling Gilbert Wakefield’s Reply to . . . the Bishop of Llandaff’s Address. Johnson was found guilty, despite the sworn statement at the hearing claiming ‘that where he could take the liberty of doing it, he has uniformly recommended the Circulation of such publications as had a tendency to promote good morals instead of such as were calculated to mislead and inflame the Common people’.4 The reason why Coleridge put his name to the Fears pamphlet was no doubt the same as Johnson’s for publishing it: a conciliatory gesture to their enemies in the press and the government. ‘France, an Ode’ had already been published in the Morning Post on 16 April (as ‘The Recantation, an Ode. By S. T. Coleridge’), and the effect had been immediate: on 23 April the Anti-Jacobin had noted how that newspaper ‘alone has wisely shrunk from our severity, reformed its Principles in some material points, and in more than one of its last columns, held a language which the Whig Club and Corresponding Society will not soon forgive’. Together the three poems in the Fears pamphlet offer a pose of recantation and patriotism, which could prove useful to the two marked men. For Johnson, who was awaiting sentence: evidence of good behaviour in the interim. For Coleridge: the opportunity to improve the odour of his name. ‘I have snapped my squeaking babytrumphet of Sedition & the fragments lie scattered in the lumber-room of Penitence’ (CL, I, p. 397), he had declared to George on 10 March; six months later, after telling his wife he had ‘desired Johnson to print in Quarto a little Poem’, he insisted that one of these ‘Quartos must be sent to my Brother’ (CL, I, p. 417). For anxious George at least, Fears was unmistakably meant as a demonstration that ‘he has ceased to deserve’ the tag of ‘Democrat & Seditionist’ (CL, I, p. 397). Fears in Solitude was reviewed by the Analytical, Johnson’s own periodical, six months before any other publication noticed it. The circulation of the pamphlet might have been small, but if the review by the Analytical was a form of advertisement to raise its profile: it worked. The Monthly and the Critical, two major liberal publications, as well as the Tory-aligned British Critic, examined


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it in 1799. Of the three poems in Fears in Solitude, ‘Frost at Midnight’ received the least attention. Nevertheless, if we allow the review in the Analytical to reprise its original function as a guide to the pamphlet, we may appreciate something of the comprehensive response that they constituted as a whole against the criticism that was being levelled at the English radicals. Let me illustrate this by juxtaposing them against a few passages from the Anti-Jacobin’s (9 July 1798) New Morality poem: The New Philosophy of modern times – . . . French PHILANTHROPY – whose boundless mind Glows with the general love of all mankind. Philanthropy – beneath whose baneful sway Each patriot passion sinks, and dies away. Taught in her School t’imbibe thy mawkish strain, CONDORCET, filter’d through the dregs of PAINE, Each pendant Prig disowns a Briton’s part, And plucks the name of ENGLAND from his heart. WHAT shall a name, a word, a sound, controul Th’ aspiring thought, and cramp th’ expansive soul? Shall one half-peopled Island’s rocky round A love that glows for all creation, bound? And social charities contract the plan Fram’d for thy Freedom, universal Man? No – through the extended globe his feelings run As broad and general as th’ unbounded Sun! No narrow bigot he – his reason’d view Thy interests, England, ranks with thine Peru – France at our doors, he sees no danger nigh, But heaves for Turkey’s woes th’ impartial sigh; A steady Patriot of the World alone, The Friend of every Country – but his own . . . For the crush’d Beetle, first – the widow’d Dove, And all the warbled sorrows of the grove. Next for poor suff’ring Guilt – and, last of all, For Parents, Friends, a King and Country’s fall. Mark her fair Votaries – Prodigal of Grief, With cureless pangs, and woes that mock relief, Droop in soft sorrow o’er a faded flow’r; O’er a dead Jack-Ass pour the pearly show’r . . .5

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110

140

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With the revolution across the Channel, political activism was in ascendance and there was widespread civil unrest. As a defensive measure against a democratic movement that was putting the country’s institutions under the greatest pressure since the Civil War, the government initiated a series of repressive measures to crack down on dissent in the name of national security. From the mid-1790s, large public gatherings were made illegal and people could be detained without trial. So severe were the punishments for expressions of discontent that poor and middle ranks alike were – according to one observer – ‘terrified into a tame and silent acquiescence’.6 Under this climate of fear,7 anyone who sought to change society in any way no matter how incremental could be branded with Jacobinism. For, as the pro-establishment writers stated in the New Morality poem, the ‘New Philosophy of modern times’ was ‘French’. It is a measure of the success of the Tories at associating the voices of dissent with France that even in a personal letter, before clarifying his political differences, Coleridge had found it necessary to declare his ‘own opinions . . . utterly untainted with French Metaphysics, French Politics, French Ethics, & French theology’ (CL, I, p. 395: to George Coleridge). Fears in Solitude certainly carried Coleridge’s ‘differences’, notably in ‘Fears in Solitude’ where he condemned his fellow countrymen for being A selfish, lewd, effeminated race, Contemptuous of all honourable rule; Yet bartering freedom, and the poor man’s life, For gold, as at a market.8 Every reviewer of the Fears pamphlet quoted these four lines, and, as in the letter, Coleridge’s objections were counterbalanced with an equally hostile rejection of the French: ‘Impious and false, a light yet cruel race, / That laugh away all virtue, mingling mirth / With deeds of murder’.9 Tory propaganda had determined such a persuasive ‘pro-English / anti-French’ binary, that, in order to validate his position of dissent, he felt it necessary to repudiate for himself its demonized ‘anti-English / pro-French’ corollary. In the Fears pamphlet, ‘France, an Ode’ reinforces this stance of Coleridge’s by dramatizing how – in the words of the Analytical – ‘the poet reconciles to the strictest consistency, his former attachment to French politics, with his present abhorrence of them’.10 A favourite target in Tory discourse is the ideal of universal love, which it identified as an ideological source of radical activity from the anti-war stance to the push for inalienable rights. The New Morality poem combines this ideal with egalitarianism, supposedly another source of radical activity, to create a satirical version that is so impersonal and uniform that it undermines patriotism. Indeed, this love is depicted to be a ‘SENSIBILITY’ of such ‘Prodigal’ proportions that it has no special allegiance to king or country, friends or parents, or even to species! The Pantisocratic pathos expressed in lines 140–143 – the appearance of Coleridge and his colleagues in the cartoon as braying


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donkeys – are facetious allusions to Coleridge’s ‘To a Young Ass’. A brief quotation from ‘To a Young Ass’ to illustrate the connection: It seems to say, ‘And have I then one Friend?’ Innocent Foal! thou poor despis’d Forlorn! I hail thee BROTHER – spite of the fool’s scorn! And fain would take thee with me, in the Dell Of Peace and mild Equality to dwell . . .11 The reference to this mawkish poem is cutting as it is immediately followed by an outline of the human cost of the French revolution: But hear unmov’d of Loire’s ensanguin’d flood, Choak’d up with slain; – of Lyons drench’d in blood; Of crimes that blot the Age, the World with shame, Foul crimes, but sicklied o’er with Freedom’s name; Altars and Thrones subverted, social life Trampled to earth – the Husband from the Wife, Parent from Child, with ruthless fury torn . . .12 By playing up the prodigality of the English radicals, by showing how opposed their ‘love that glows for all creation’ was to common sense and the natural sociability of local attachments, they were effectively accused of being fanatical enthusiasts.13 Clearly, Gillray was partly seizing upon this when he represented them as a religious cult in New Morality (see Figure 1.1). As a tactic, it was participating in a broader loyalist attempt to undermine their leading personalities through bogus political tracts and scandalous biographies. Thomas Paine, for example, was described as ‘a brutal and savage husband, and an unnatural father’ in a biography that also exhorted its reader ‘to look round among his acquaintances, and see . . . if there be one among the yelping kennels of modern patriots, who is not a bad husband, father, brother, or son’!14 The New Morality poem had virtually singled out Coleridge as one of these prodigal ‘Votaries’; as a poet and writer, for him to remain silent was to ‘hear unmov’d’. So, how did he respond? Reading ‘Fears in Solitude’ and ‘France, an Ode’ together, he becomes almost loquacious on the horrors that occur (or might occur) to his ‘human brethren’ in England and France. ‘Fears in Solitude’ repudiates the ‘unbounded’ sentiment in the New Morality poem by affirming the ties of country, friendship and family through an image of enclosure: But, O dear Britain! O my mother Isle! Needs must thou prove a name most dear and holy To me, a son, a brother, and a friend, A husband and a father! who revere

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Coleridge, Revision and Romanticism All bonds of natural love, and find them all Within the limits of thy rocky shores.15

Moreover, what ‘Fears in Solitude’ merely tells, ‘Frost at Midnight’ actually shows through the dramatization of close human relations in enclosed spaces. The domestic setting of ‘Frost at Midnight’ does not disqualify it from being political. On the contrary, as John Barrell has argued, the conflict between the country’s own ‘ancien regime and the democratic movement’ had led to ‘a new degree of the politicisation of private space’ from the mid-to-late 1790s.16 Radical sympathizers responded to the muckraking loyalist publications with their own exposés of prominent public figures;17 ostensibly domestic narratives commented or were used to comment on political issues;18 indeed, Jon Mee traces the public display of domestic affections that takes place in Coleridge’s conversation poems to the ‘concern at [that] time to the entire reform movement . . . to represent itself as the harbinger of “reform not riot”’.19 The English radical according to the English radical is not a zealot hungry for French-style revolutionary chaos, but a peace-loving familyorientated gentleman. Every poem has its politics, but not every poem is political. ‘Frost at Midnight’ is a political poem because of its political context, because of its connection to the two political poems that accompany it, and – as we shall see – because its politics may have been the most radical of the three poems in Fears in Solitude.

∗∗∗ That letter which Coleridge wrote on 10 March 1798 to his brother provides a curiously accurate prolepsis of the way he would craft his public persona through Fears in Solitude. His disassociating himself from both the Tories and the Whig Opposition (CL, I, p. 396: ‘You think, my Brother! that there can be but two parties at present, for the Government & against the Government. – It may be so – I am of no party’) is re-enacted in ‘Fears in Solitude’, which simultaneously criticizes English society and sounds a war cry against France. He employed a political metaphor of clothes in the letter (CL, I, p. 396: ‘The Opposition & the Democrats are not only vicious – they wear the filthy garments of vice’) and in the poem: As if a government had been a robe, On which our vice and wretchedness were tagg’d Like fancy-points and fringes, with the robe Pull’d off at pleasure.20 Next, his recantation (CL, I, p. 397: ‘I have snapped my squeaking babytrumpet of Sedition’) is perfectly matched by the state of penitence in ‘France, an Ode’ where – to repeat the Analytical’s public interpretation of the


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poem – ‘the poet reconciles . . . his former attachment to french [sic] politics, with his present abhorrence of them’. Finally, towards the end of the letter, Coleridge presented himself leading a life of contemplation and contentment (CL, I, pp. 397–398) that ‘Frost at Midnight’ exactly emulates. The three poems form a sequential argument: ‘Fears in Solitude’ and ‘France, an Ode’ send out metonymic signals that resonate in ‘Frost at Midnight’. Sea, hill, and wood, This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood, With all the numberless goings on of life, Inaudible as dreams!21 ‘Sea . . . hill . . . wood’ is repeated successively investing the phrase with the intensity of a mantra. Privately, it might have been intended as a reminder to George about the ‘Frost at Midnight’ section in the letter where it is written: ‘I love fields & woods & mountains with almost a visionary fondness’ (CL, I, p. 397). Publicly, for the reader of the pamphlet, this repetition of ‘hill’ taken together with ‘the numberless goings on of life’ and the silence recalls the assertion in ‘Fears in Solitude’: that he must think What uproar and what strife may now be stirring This way or that way o’er these silent hills – Invasion, and the thunder and the shout, And all the crash of onset; fear and rage And undetermined conflict – even now, Ev’n now, perchance, and in his native Isle, Carnage and screams beneath this blessed sun!22 It is the fear of invasion that underlies the persona’s anxiety over his surroundings in ‘Frost at Midnight’; his remaining awake in a household ‘all at rest’ is, in other words, a state of vigilance. The hooting owlet is another feature of ‘Frost at Midnight’ that connects it to ‘Fears in Solitude’, in which Forth from his dark and lonely hiding-place (Portentous sight) the owlet, ATHEISM, Sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon, Drops his blue-fringed lids, and holds them close, And, hooting at the glorious sun in heaven, Cries out, ‘where is it?’23 The owlet was Coleridge’s emblem for atheism in 1798.24 He regarded atheism as a form of intellectual blindness, which is perhaps why he made the owlet in ‘Fears in Solitude’ fly with its eyes closed.25 As a philosophy, atheism was

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often linked to France; hence, the labelling in ‘Fears in Solitude’ of the French as the ‘impious foe’. But how is France or atheism specifically related to the patriotic, godrespecting household in ‘Frost at Midnight’? Nether Stowey, the declared location of the persona,26 is geographically a most unlikely point for a French invasion whether directly from France or through Ireland. Moreover, both the conflict and the owlet are ostensibly shut out; one by the distance, ‘Inaudible as dreams’, while the other is simply placed outside. The poem moves on and they are left behind – but are they? The thin blue flame Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not: Only that film, which flutter’d on the grate, Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing, Methinks, it’s motion in this hush of nature Gives it dim sympathies with me, who live, Making it a companionable form, With which I can hold commune.27 The key is the repetition of ‘flutter’, for this and Coleridge’s referring to the burning soot as ‘the sole unquiet thing’ recalls the solitary hooting owlet. There is a play of meanings on ‘unquiet’: ‘the sole unquiet thing’ is just as applicable to Coleridge’s uneasy persona. To further complicate matters, the fireside scene in ‘Frost at Midnight’ is consciously drawing upon at least three other literary texts: The Task (1785) of William Cowper,28 Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden (1796)29 and ‘The Ruined Cottage’ (1798) by William Wordsworth.30 It was the ‘sooty films that play upon the bars’ that prompted the persona in The Task to ‘deep deliberation’.31 When Wollstonecraft adopted the fireside pose a decade later, she used it to allude to her revolutionary ‘sympathies’. Though she was with her baby, with ‘every thing around . . . [like] home’, her ‘thoughts’ were ‘abroad’: ‘Some recollections, attached to the idea of home, mingled with reflections respecting the state of society I had been contemplating that evening, made a tear drop on the rosy cheek that I had just kissed’. To be specific, her persona cannot stop thinking about ‘the horrors’ she had ‘witnessed in France’.32 Coleridge’s ‘dim sympathies’ correlates as well with Wordsworth’s ‘shadowy Sympathies’ (CL, I, p. 397), ‘a feeling or frame of mind evoked by and responsive to some external influence’ (OED, XVII, p. 460). By already associating the soot with the owlet, holding ‘commune’ with the soot ultimately connected his fireside persona to the owlet. Again, there are multiple meanings at play; the persona and the soot could be in communion, as in ‘[an] intimate intercourse’ (OED, III, p. 577), or the word could be understood as a comment on their commonality (OED, III, p. 577). The second reading is supportable because ‘sympathies’ can also be read as ‘affinities’, with ‘companionable’ acquiring the sense of ‘matching’ (OED, III,


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p. 588). So, to sum up, in Coleridge’s fireside scene, does the ‘motion’ of the soot make it seem alive like the persona, or, as an atheist might have it, does it correspond to him and all ‘who live’ because life consists in animation? Metonymically at least, there occurs a French invasion of sorts: through the owlet, France is in Nether Stowey; through the film of burning soot, France infiltrates the persona’s very household. The sooty film reappears in the past of the persona and along with it, a palimpsest of the owlet: behind the ‘unclos’d lids’ of the day-dreaming ‘school-boy’ is the similarly inattentive owlet of ‘Fears in Solitude’ who – flying in broad daylight – ‘Drops his blue-fringed lids, and holds them close’.33 This venture into the past becomes a quest for ‘sympathies’ of a different kind: ‘For still I hop’d to see the stranger’s face, / Townsman, or aunt, or sister more belov’d, / My play-mate when we both were cloth’d alike’.34 From ‘companionable’ soot to ‘stranger’, ‘Townsman’, ‘aunt’, then ‘sister’, his search is not only in an order of increasing closeness of relationship, but simultaneously for a ‘form’ most ‘alike’ himself. The journey reveals the history behind his yearning for a ‘companionable form’, and his hopes for the child sleeping by him: I was rear’d In the great city, pent mid cloisters dim, And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars. But thou, my babe! Shalt wander, like a breeze, By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds, Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible Of that eternal language, which thy God Utters, who from eternity doth teach Himself in all, and all things in himself. Great universal Teacher! He shall mould Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.35 Where the persona used to be largely constrained by man and man-made structures, his child will partake of the limitless Logos.36 From a portent of ‘the arrival of some absent friend’,37 to suddenly having a ‘face’,38 this progressive humanization of the burning soot leads to a final startling transformation. The persona discovers that the cold air outside has formed ‘icicles’, ‘which’ Like those, my babe . . . ere to-morrow’s warmth Have capp’d their sharp keen points with pendulous drops,

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Coleridge, Revision and Romanticism Will catch thine eye, and with their novelty Suspend thy little soul; then make thee shout, And stretch and flutter from thy mother’s arms As thou would’st fly for very eagerness.39

It is the repetition of ‘flutter’ that gives it away. The baby would be the logical fulfilment of his mission, for as Hartley, Coleridge’s firstborn son, he would have had the close companion who was simultaneously most like him. In the poem is it not after all the ‘living spirit’ of the father that is transfused into the ‘lifeless’ soot,40 which is in turn but a prefiguration of the child? There is more: for behind the image of the soot behind the image of the child is the image of the owlet. As a matter of fact, Coleridge’s ‘babe’ is manifestly bird-like, with the ‘shout’ echoing the ‘owlet’s cry’.41 To appreciate the implications of this manoeuvre, it is crucial to recognize that the owlet is not the only French bird operating in the Fears pamphlet; the other appears at the end of ‘France, an Ode’: ‘Thou speedest on thy subtle pinions, / To live amid the winds, and move upon the waves . . . O Liberty, my spirit felt thee there’.42 Besides atheism, ‘Liberty’ was also closely associated with France. It was a position that the Tories took issue with, as the following tirade in the New Morality poem illustrates: Foul crimes, but sicklied o’er with Freedom’s name . . . Such is the lib’ral Justice which presides In these our days, and modern Patriots guides – Justice, whose blood-stain’d Book one sole Decree, One Statute fills – ‘the People shall be Free.’ Free by what means? – by folly, madness, guilt, By boundless rapines, blood in oceans spilt; By Confiscation, in whose sweeping toils The poor Man’s pittance with the rich Man’s spoils, Mix’d in one common mass, are swept away – To glut the short-liv’d Tyrant of the day. By Laws, Religion, Morals all o’erthrown, – Rouse then, ye Sov’reign People, claim your own – The License that enthrals, the Truth that blinds, The Wealth that starves you, and the Pow’r that grinds. – So Justice bids – ’twas her enlighten’d doom, LOUIS, thy head devoted to the tomb – ’Twas Justice claim’d, in that accursed hour, The fatal forfeit of too lenient pow’r. Mourn for the Man we may – but for the King – Freedom, oh! Freedom’s such a charming thing.43

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The ‘Freedom’ there was not ‘Liberty’ – a word that the pro-government publication notably omitted to use – but ‘License’. While events eventually force the persona in ‘France, an Ode’ to renounce the French, he is loath to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. As the Analytical understood it, ‘He yet remains the ardent worshipper of liberty; it is France – the apostate France, who impiously profanes her holy altars, and deluges them with blood’.44 The concluding six lines of ‘Frost at Midnight’ arguably allude to this second bird ‘Liberty’ by breaking the language of enclosure.45 The poem moves out of the persona’s house into open space, and the final image of the son reaching out for even more space works dynamically against the constraint of the mother’s arms – indeed – against the closure of the poem itself. An infant boy reaching out from a mother’s arms is also the archetypal representation of the Madonna and Child. Using the image in the 1790s to symbolize ‘Liberty’ is entirely appropriate, if Coleridge’s opposition to the Test Acts is taken into account. Enacted soon after the Reformation as a bulwark against Catholic hegemony, the Test Acts effectively barred not only the English Catholics but also anyone who did not profess the State religion from holding public office. To Coleridge, a practising Unitarian and political reformer, their abolition formed an essential part of a broader emancipatory objective – to quote him in the 20 January 1798 issue of the Morning Post: ‘a full, fair, and free representation in Parliament’ for ‘the Irish People’ and ‘at home’ (EOT (CC), I, p. 17). This was what the Critical Review had asked about ‘France, an Ode’ in August 1799: ‘The conclusion . . . is very ridiculous . . . What does Mr. Coleridge mean by liberty in this passage? or what connexion has it with the subject of civil freedom’?46 Coleridge makes perfect sense when we consider ‘Frost at Midnight’ to be the real ending to the poem.

∗∗∗ There is a curious repetition that many critics have seized upon: ‘secret ministry’. It opens ‘Frost at Midnight’ and reappears towards the end to reveal the infant boy as its intended target.47 Bearing in mind my interpretation of the poem, the reader may well ask: why the secrecy? What possible rationale could there be for Coleridge to engage in the kind of complex subterfuge that I have insisted upon for the 1798 version of ‘Frost at Midnight’? Perhaps it had something to do with the articulation of ideals (such as ‘Liberty’) that had become a lot less acceptable. Portraying his wife and son in the pose of the Madonna and Child was controversial enough without an odious reputation and the context of the Irish Catholic uprisings in May and June. The nightmare scenario was for the French to land in Ireland and precipitate a successful nationwide rebellion: the subtitle to Fears in Solitude reads ‘written in 1798, during the alarm of an invasion’.

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Furthermore, there is a discernable motive: to retaliate at the publication that had ridiculed him. Of key importance is the use of ‘secret’. The Anti-Jacobin associated the word with radicalism. For its section on poetry, it had set itself the double objective of exposing the ‘effusions of the Jacobin Muse’ and acquiring ‘by dint of repeating after them, a more complete knowledge of the secret in which their greatness lies’. According to the editor, although it would be endless to chase the coy Muse of Jacobinism through all her characters . . . in whatever disguise she appears, whether of mirth or of melancholy, of piety or of tenderness, under all disguises, like Sir John Brute in woman’s clothes, she is betrayed by her drunken swagger and ruffian tone.48 The 1798 ‘Prefatory Address’ to the magazine version went even further in proposing that it was the defining characteristic of ‘Jacobinism’ to secretly renew itself through transformation: We know the spirit . . . too well to be deceived by any appearances which it may assume that are foreign from its nature; we know its purpose to be fixed and determined; though vanquished in one shape, it will rise up in another; and nothing short of its annihilation can justify confidence, or produce security. We shall, therefore, continue to watch its motions, with anxious solicitude, and incessant attention: we are not unacquainted with its secret recesses; we have traced it from the root, through all its various ramifications, to the very summit; and our efforts will not cease until we have not only lopped off every noxious branch, but felled the hideous trunk itself to the ground.49 The British Critic saw nothing more in ‘Frost at Midnight’ than a domestic tale of ‘much expressive tenderness’. In the complex packaging and repackaging of ideals and forms, Coleridge took on the allies of the ruling establishment in their own terms: the point is that the baby of this poem escaped them.

1.2 Frost at Midnights ‘Frost at Midnight’ is similar to Coleridge’s other major poems in that it exists in multiple versions. In fact, changes were made to ‘Frost at Midnight’ at every subsequent publication until 1829. The part showing the most revision (see Figure 1.2), or, as Miall puts it, giving him ‘the most trouble’, ‘was that beginning at line 20 where he attempted several times to explain the sense of sympathy with the inanimate film fluttering on the bars of the fire’.50 To recapitulate the question that is elicited by the fireside scene: does the ‘motion’ of the soot make it seem alive like the persona, or, as an atheist might have it, does it correspond to him and all ‘who live’ because life consists


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1798 With which I can hold commune. Idle thought! But still the living spirit in our frame, That loves not to behold a lifeless thing, Transfuses into all it’s own delights It’s own volition, sometimes with deep faith, And sometimes with fantastic playfulness. Ah me! amus’d by no such curious toys Of the self-watching subtilizing mind, How often in my early school-boy days, With most believing superstitious wish

20

With which I can hold commune: haply hence, That still the living spirit in our frame, Which loves not to behold a lifeless thing, Transfuses into all things its own will, And its own pleasures; sometimes with deep faith, And sometimes with a wilful playfulness, That stealing pardon from our common sense Smiles, as self-scornful, to disarm the scorn For these wild reliques of our childish Thought, That ﬂit about, oft go, and oft return Not uninvited. Ah there was a time, When oft, amused by no such subtle toys Of the self-watching Mind, a child at school, With most believing superstitious wish

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To which the living spirit in our frame, That loves not to behold a lifeless thing, Transfuses its own pleasures, its own will.

20

25

1812

25

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1817

How oft, at school, with most believing mind, 1829 & 1834 Whose puny ﬂaps and freaks the idling Spirit By its own moods interprets, every where Echo or mirror seeking of itself, And makes a toy of Thought. But O! how oft,

20

Figure 1.2 ‘Frost at Midnight’, 1798–1829 (poem) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The published versions of the most heavily revised passage in the poem collated.

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in animation? The persona responds self-consciously with a statement on psychodynamics; in the original poem, he asserted that the human mind fluctuates between ‘deep faith’ and ‘fantastic playfulness’.51 Though this fanciful psychologizing was to be repeatedly amended, it is in every version followed by the same anecdote: a story about the conviction he had as a schoolboy that the sighting of burning soot on the grating of a fireplace portended the arrival of a friend or loved one. In the 1798 version, Coleridge did not valorize one by deprecating the other. If the schoolboy’s belief was a ‘superstitious wish’, there was also something not quite right about the sceptical adult that engaged with the folklore surrounding burning ‘films’ at the level of ‘curious toys’. The effect was on the whole a balanced opposition between childhood experience and adult perception. It is through the persona’s infant that this thematic division is eventually broken down. According to ‘Frost at Midnight’, the Past is formative. While it is the adult as narrator who ostensibly shapes his childhood experience, it is also always clear that the kind of man he is – his very perceptions – is structured by the experience that he chooses to relate. The grandiose projection of how his son will realize a holistic apprehension of God in Existence, for example, has all the hallmarks of the ‘most believing superstitious wish’ that he had imputed to his schoolboy self in the 1798 version. Adult and child were united experientially and physically as well in the original poem, by way of the anticipation on the part of the persona in the closing six lines that he and his family would be greeted by a morning spectacle of icicles. If Coleridge meant to cast his wife and son in the image of the Madonna and Child, as I have earlier argued, then so much the better. The myth the persona had held as a schoolboy and the fond hopes that he entertained as a father were hardly grounds for ‘deep faith’, which arguably called for a religious connection. Furthermore, using his son to portray God in this artful way would simultaneously clinch the antithesis that he had set up with ‘fantastic playfulness’. The activity of mind depicted in the fireside scene conditions a large part of the poem. Involving the adult narrator in various states of belief, it dramatized the problem that Coleridge was to wrestle with for much of his life: how to go beyond the Self that simply denies (Atheism) without entering that which is simply created by the Self (Superstition)? Three years before ‘Frost at Midnight’, in an allegory opening the first of his ‘Six Lectures on Revealed Religion’, he had upheld religion as the golden mean between atheism and superstition. In the allegory, those fleeing from religious superstition toward a total disbelief in all religion merely complete a circle that brings them back to ‘Mystery’ in another guise (Lects 1795 (CC), p. 89 footnote 1). In the ‘Frost at Midnight’, apprehending God and the attainment of true knowledge – satisfying to the senses (‘see and hear’) and to the mind (‘intelligible’) – are inextricably intertwined. This pose of religiosity is, however, undertaken by the persona when he is at his most problematically grandiose; taking into


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account the prominence of Coleridge’s religious concerns in the 1790s,52 I would suggest that ‘Frost at Midnight’ simply needed the far more convincingly religious posture that the Marian gesture struck at the end of the poem in 1798. Without the Marian gesture, Coleridge is inexplicably silent on one of the central issues dogging the political scene in the 1790s: Catholic emancipation. He was never pro-Catholic, in an early lecture he had declared: He who sees any real difference between the Church of Rome and the Church of England possesses optics which I do not possess – the mark of the antichrist is on both of them. Have not both an intimate alliance with the powers of this World, which Jesus positively forbids? Are they not both decked with gold and precious stones? Is there not written on both their Foreheads Mystery! (Lects 1795 (CC), p. 210) The analogical use of optical instrumentation and physiognomy indicates that he almost certainly wrote this lecture in 1795.53 Indeed, he seems to be alluding to the ‘dream’ encounters in the first of his ‘Six Lectures on Revealed Religion’: to ‘Religion’ who presented him with an ‘optic Glass’ and to the ‘mysteries’ of the goddess Superstition and her dissenters ‘whose Foreheads spoke Thought’ (Lects 1795 (CC), pp. 90–91). The above extract, however, represents Coleridge’s only overtly anti-Catholic expression for the period.54 Whatever his reservations about Catholicism it did not stop him supporting Charles James Fox through the Morning Post (EOT (CC), I, pp. 13–17), even though the Foxite Whigs were the emancipation party. Ideologically, Catholicism may be further from Unitarianism than Anglicanism, but he had been more consistently critical of the latter in his early lectures and writings. The 1795 allegory, in its references to ‘men in Black Robes’ and the practice of tithing, for example, links ‘Superstition’ solely with the Church of England.55 A Unitarian toleration of Catholicism was consonant with the times. Politically, Unitarians and Catholics were united by their agitation against the Test Acts and their distaste for religious enthusiasm. John Bossy argues that a mutual understanding existed between Catholics and Unitarians at least as far back as the 1780s. By the time of ‘Frost at Midnight’, they were already attending sermons in one another’s chapels.56 With respect to Coleridge, Catholicism looms large in his private notebooks. In the notes that he took of the denomination during his year-long sojourn to Germany, there is no hint of hostility at all. On the contrary, in these earliest encounters of his with an ostensibly Catholic landscape, devotional practices, local beliefs and iconography were conscientiously recorded with unmistakable affection: [From] the bottom of a little Print in a Roman Catholic Village in the electorate of Mentz – May 1799 . . .

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Coleridge, Revision and Romanticism Sleep, my Jesu! – Mother’s smiling, Sweetest Sleep thy sense beguiling, Sleep my Jesu! balmily – If thou sleep not, Mother mourneth, Singing while her Wheel she turneth, Stay, sweet Slumber, hov’ringly. (CN, I, entry 409)

Coleridge’s interest in Catholic iconography is important in two respects. First, the plethora of religious imagery in these entries throws into sharp relief the dearth of equivalent archetypes for Unitarianism. Secondly, it is significant that his most extensive detail of Catholic iconography is the Madonna and Child. This is indicative of how much he idolized the maternal position: as an image it is recurrent in his writings. The hymn he recorded was certainly of lasting interest to him; he published Latin and English versions under the title of ‘The Virgin’s Cradle Hymn’ from 1801.57 Marian iconography was (and remains) the most recognizable feature of Catholicism. Historically, using the Madonna and Child as a gesture towards Catholic emancipation could not have been more strategic. The three years leading up to the publication of ‘Frost at Midnight’ was a trying period for Catholics. 1796 was the year Bonaparte invaded Italy and he had promised his men the plunder of Rome in revenge for the death of Basseville, one of the secretaries of the legation, whom the populace murdered in 1793. During that time when the invading army overran the Papal States, a series of strange events took place throughout Italy that were commonly believed by Catholics to be miraculous. The first and chief manifestation of the kind emerged at Ancona, where a celebrated picture of the Madonna was seen to open and shut its eyes. As it so happened, French troops did not reach Rome that year. Furthermore, in February 1797, a Treaty of Peace was signed between Napoleon and the Papacy at Tolentino that promised a peaceful conclusion. In France itself, there was a reaction in support of Catholicism. The Directory issued an invitation for the exiled priests to return, while those who had been gathered together at homes and institutions as superannuated were freed. There seemed a real prospect for the re-establishment of the religion and a number of priests who had sought refuge overseas went back.58 The Italians responded with an immense outburst of devotion and it is likely that the Madonna became the focus for Catholic hopes in general. At home, Joseph Berington’s pamphlet entitled An Examination of Events, Termed Miraculous, as Reported in Letters from Italy (1796) sneered at the whole affair. He was quickly opposed in kind by George Bruning, and, in the following year, by John Milner, who issued A Serious Expostulation with Rev. Joseph Berington. The suspension of hostilities that coincided with the manifestation at Ancona did not last however. In France, revolutionaries started to use bloodhounds in their search


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for priests trying to hide behind wainscotings and other secret places. French troops marched into Rome and immediately recognized the Roman republic proclaimed by a group of radicals on 15 February 1798. Pope Pius VI himself was taken prisoner; though in delicate health, he was shuttled from one place of captivity to another until his death 18 months later on French soil at Valence.59 The year 1798 is a dark year in Catholic history and in the face of adversity it is the nature of the religious to respond with prayer and devotion: John Douglass, the bishop of London, published his Mandates . . . Appointing Prayers to be Sung or Said in All the Roman Catholic Chapels for . . . Pope Pius VI. Coleridge had an interest in miracles. Furthermore, it was in his interest as a newspaper reporter to keep in touch with events on the Continent: he in fact commented on the fall of Rome on March 8 (EOT (CC), I, pp. 24–26). That he knew enough of the situation of Catholics in France and Italy to reflect their concerns in the way in which I am suggesting may seem far-fetched. But I do not think the ‘February 1798’ dating of ‘Frost at Midnight’ served a purely chronological function.60 In addition, there is the near-contemporaneous notebook entry of his that can be read as a sort of postscript by him to the entire incident: ‘Miracles must be judged by the doctrine which they confirm not the doctrine by the miracle . . . The Romanists argue preposterously while they would prove the truth by miracles, whereas they should prove the miracles by the truth’ (CN, I, entry 1010). In a conversation over an early draft of this chapter, John Barrell pointed out to me that ‘the image of the Child could be anti-Catholic – Jesus trying to flee from the Madonna’. The final vision of ‘Frost at Midnight’ is certainly pregnant with dualities, a representation of ‘deep faith’ and ‘fantastic playfulness’, concrete and yet elusive. Coleridge might have been registering the ambivalence of his position on the Catholic religion, that is, politically allied but ideologically estranged. The very dark cloud of 1798 did have a silver lining. On English soil, Catholics were confronted with a vista of opportunities. The legal restraints on Catholic practices that had been enacted under the progress of the Reformation were already mostly abolished. The Relief Act of 1791, for example, legalized Roman Catholic worship and the building of chapels.61 The ground was ripe. The 1790s saw the first major wave of Irish immigration, with the industrial revolution creating among those whose lives had been transformed an audience more genuinely prepared to listen to what the missionaries had to say. It was the legacy of bishop Richard Challoner that the Irish became a missionary prerogative for the clergy, and the revolution across Europe was literally adding to their ranks: because of the renewed persecution in France the exiles began to look upon their mission here as the permanent work of their lives.62 In London, a flurry of church building commenced, signalling the advent of what Bossy has called ‘a golden age of the English mission’ – or, to go by the title that Bernard Ward settled upon for his classic work: The Dawn of Catholic Revival in England. The signs were evident by the time of the Fears pamphlet so it would be presumptuous I think to draw the conclusion that

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Coleridge read only failure in the miracles, or that the Marian image was a sympathetic even ironic gesture to a religion that he felt was on its way out. He just did not subscribe to the deterministic capability of such religious phenomena, which he scorned as an erroneous outlook of the ‘Romanists’. For a complex period in a state of flux, he ended ‘Frost at Midnight’ with an image that was in every respect as conflicted and tantalizingly suggestive.

∗∗∗ In 1812, ‘Fears in Solitude’, ‘France, an Ode’ and ‘Frost at Midnight’ were republished in The Poetical Register, and Repository of Fugitive Poetry.63 Though they were Coleridge’s only poems in the collection, they were printed separately from one another: beginning on pages 227, 332 and 530 respectively. ‘Frost at Midnight’ was radically changed; there were 14 mostly new lines for the fireside scene (see Figure 1.2) and the six lines that originally ended it were removed altogether. The latter was Coleridge’s first modification to the poem, which he introduced in 1807 while staying with the Wordsworths at Coleorton. The six lines in question are cancelled in Coleridge’s copy of the Fears pamphlet, in which it is also written at the bottom of the page: ‘I omit because they destroy the rondo, and return upon itself of the Poem. Poems of this kind of length ought to lie coiled [like a snake] with it’s tail round it’s head’.64 While this change to the ending was consistent with the broader movement in poetry to emulate the forms of music,65 I believe that these revisions of his were motivated by different concerns. The first was his developing anti-Catholicism. As late as 1802, he had managed this positive comment on Catholic doctrine: Meditate on Trans substantiation! What a conception of a miracle! Were one a Catholic, what a sublime oration might not one make of it! – Perpetual, πantopical – yet offering no violence to the Sense, exercising no domination over the free will – the beautiful Fuel of the Fire of Faith / the fire must be pre-existent, or it is not fuel – yet it feeds & supports, & is necessary to feed & support, the fire that converts it into its own nature. (CN, I, entry 1247) However, right from the beginning of his two-year mission to the Mediterranean – from 1804 to 1806 – his notebook record on every aspect of Catholic life was one of unrelenting execration. The most comprehensive biography on his overseas mission is Donald Sultana’s Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Malta and Italy. Sultana situates Coleridge’s anti-Catholicism in ‘the Protestantism of the nonconformists at home’, which was opposed to ‘[t]he Anglican tradition being tolerant and prone to compromise’.66 By this line of logic his hostility was the result of him being overexposed to Catholicism, towards which he as a nonconformist would have had a heightened sensitivity. The first part of this premise is


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outdated. As Bossy has already pointed out, Unitarians and Catholics were closely allied socially and politically.67 The second part, which is still used to ascribe to Coleridge a generally negative outlook on Catholicism, fails to account for the positive comments that he did make on the religion before going to Malta and Italy. Coleridge’s precise language is the key to understanding his anti-Catholicism. An examination of his pre-Malta writings reveals a curious nuance: where the religion is connected to Rome the presentation is invariably negative. In 1795, he had attacked ‘the Church of Rome’ for ‘an intimate alliance with the powers of this World’ (Lects 1795 (CC), p. 210); in 1801, it was with ‘The Romanists’ that he registered his theological point of difference on ‘miracles’ (CN, I, entry 1010). Conversely, when ‘Catholic’ is the term of reference the representations are generally positive. This is plainly the case with the notebook entries on Germany (CN, I, entries 403, 409–410); indeed, Coleridge was at his most unequivocally affirmative when dealing with Catholicism on a purely ideological level divorced from its national and international context (see, for example, CN, I, entry 1302). I would suggest that he was, effectively, distinguishing Catholicisms. The status of the religion varied considerably across Europe. As the belief of a small minority in England, its followers were more conciliatory and prone to compromise. On the issue of emancipation, for example, where English Catholics would stop at the abolition of the Test Acts, their counterparts in Ireland had made it clear by the 1790s that nothing short of Irish independence would be satisfactory.68 Moreover, the devotional practice of the English Catholic emerges as ‘individualist and meditative’,69 which was more in line with the rituals of the Protestant majority than the kind of collectivist and boisterous displays that Coleridge noted with distaste in Malta: The passion of the Maltese (of Catholics in general?) for Noise. Easter Sunday / This & the day preceding, what Bell jangling, what incessant firing of Guns, even the children at every three yards letting off gunpowderpreparations . . . Noise and Nothingness / this is the Sum of the Indifferent Parts of the Religion . . . (CN, II, entry 2547) The two characteristics which I have observed in Roman Catholic Mummery, Processions, Baptisms, &c – the immense Noise & Jingle Jingle, as if to frighten the Dæmon, Common-sense; & 2. The unmoved stupid uninterested faces of the Conjurers – I have noticed no exceptions. – Of Superstition in general, is not its very nature, as being utterly sensuous, cold, except where it is sensual? (CN, II, entry 2561) The nonconformist environment that English Catholics were a part of had socialized them. Debate was vigorous to the extent that the clergy could openly disagree as in the pamphlet war over the miracles in Italy. Coleridge registered

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his difference of opinion on this matter with ‘The Romanists’ probably because many of the Catholics at home would have had little trouble agreeing with him. The profusion of Catholic iconography in Germany and Malta had such impact on him not only because they were less ubiquitous in England, but it might also have been the case that they were less ubiquitous among the English Catholics themselves.70 Malta must have constituted something of a cultural shock for Coleridge; to oversimplify, he entered an environment in which Catholicism was enlivened not by dialogue, but by the pageantry of ritual and ceremony. In Germany at least, there had been a community of intellectuals for him to engage with. In Malta, estranged from his wife and children, addicted to opium and in ill health – to paraphrase Richard Holmes – he expected to die.71 Coleridge’s position on miracles was clear and unchanging: as events that contradicted God’s promise of free will to man by impinging upon his right to disbelieve they should never occur, ideally, should never have occurred. Back when he was starting out as a lecturer in Bristol, he had regretted the Biblical wonders as a necessary concession on God’s part for an age where the ‘Jews were like the other nations of that Day, comparatively children’ (Lects 1795 (CC), p. 115). Though he never subscribed to the Catholic concept of transubstantiation, philosophically, he could not help but admire how this miracle in ‘offering no violence to the Sense’ would actually exercise ‘no domination over the free will’ (CN, I, entry 1247). But in Malta and Italy, from the pictures and statues, to miracle-working Saints – whom he derided as engaging in ‘blasphemous’ acts of ‘out-Jesusing Jesus’ (CN, II, entry 2760) – he read in the people precisely the religious perspective he had been critical of since November 1801 (CN, I, entry 1010). That is, an attitude that will have the truths of Christianity proved by supernatural events. Coleridge saw in such an outlook an entrenched attachment to sensual phenomena, which he believed to be ultimately detrimental to human reason and progress. After a few months in Malta, the nuanced treatment of Catholicism in the notebooks gives way to an anthropological urge to infer from the specific behaviour of the Maltese the characteristics of ‘Catholics in general’ (CN, II, entry 2547). Where Coleridge had once been anti-Roman Catholic, he was now basically against all Catholics.72 Coleridge’s whole religious orientation was in the process of change. He landed in England on 17 August 1806, by which time – as the letter he would write to George Fricker in October demonstrates – he had fallen out with Unitarianism as well: I am far from surprised that, having seen what you have seen, and suffered what you have suffered, you should have opened your soul to a sense of our fallen nature; and the incapability of man to heal himself . . . I have experienced a similar alteration. I was for many years a Socinian; and at times a Naturalist, but sorrow, and ill health, and disappointment in the only


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wish I had ever cherished, forced me to look into myself; I read the New Testament again, and I became fully convinced, that Socinianism was not only not the doctrine of the New Testament, but that it scarcely deserved the name of a religion in any sense. (CL, II, p. 1189) In this important letter he not only adopted a benign stance towards the Church of England, but also indicated his conversion to a Trinitarian concept of God. It was shortly after this that he took the decision to drop the last six lines of ‘Frost at Midnight’. The revision, which removes the Marian gesture at the end of the poem, makes sense in the light of the narrative that I am advancing of his developing anti-Catholicism. ‘Frost at Midnight’ is by no means the only work of his whose alterations can be seen in the context of a religious reorientation. When he reused the ‘dream’ opening his 1795 ‘Lectures on Revealed Religion’ for a newspaper article in 1811, he changed the ecclesiastics responsible for the ‘Temple of Superstition’ from Anglican clerics to Catholic priests (EOT (CC), II, pp. 263–264).73 There is another possible reason for the decision Coleridge took at Coleorton to cancel the last six lines of ‘Frost at Midnight’: revulsion for his wife. Wordsworth had written to Sir George Beaumont on 8 September, ‘he dare not go home, he recoils so much from the thought of domesticating with Mrs. Coleridge’ (WL, II, p. 78). In November, Wordsworth was informed that he and Sara had ‘determined to part absolutely and finally’; indeed, Rosemary Ashton thinks that Coleridge’s stay at Coleorton was intended to facilitate this separation.74 In that important letter to Fricker, who was his brother-in-law, he had alluded to his matrimonial troubles by mentioning his ‘disappointment in the only deep wish [he] . . . ever cherished’. Dropping the last six lines of ‘Frost at Midnight’, Coleridge ensured his wife would never return to him and that the poem would never culminate in the conjugal contentment that he felt to be lost to him. Though the change to the ending of ‘Frost at Midnight’ was attributed to aesthetics, those final six lines in fact represented an emotional and ideological investment that Coleridge was no longer prepared to make. The 1798 version had been favourably received; there really was no pressing need for him to modify the poem any further, much less to institute a change that ran directly counter to the approbation it enjoyed as an expression of happy domesticity. He might have created a rondo through which the poem returns ‘upon itself’ as it were to the winter night at the beginning, but at the cost of him disrupting the perfectly balanced coherence that I have earlier indicated. The ‘trouble’ the passage ‘beginning at line 20’ gave Coleridge was the result of this decision to cancel the last six lines of ‘Frost and Midnight’, and the subsequent revisions attempts on his part to stabilize a poem that he had been compelled to mutilate.

∗∗∗

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The persona’s oscillation between belief and scepticism in the fireside scene established the rhetorical structure that governed ‘Frost at Midnight’ as a whole. Without the image of the Madonna and Child, however, ‘faith’ no longer had a point of connection. Coleridge dealt with this by weakening the corresponding counterpoint, ‘playfulness’, from ‘fantastic’ in the original to the more straightforwardly pejorative ‘wilful’ in the version that he subsequently published in 1812 (see Figure 1.2), as well as adding four new lines that essentially devalued the attitude associated with it as a childish whimsy. In other words, to preserve the balance that existed between childhood experience and adult perception, he made ‘playfulness’ in every way as tangential to the fabric of the poem as ‘faith’ had become. Furthermore, the elaboration that he introduced is itself problematic: by ascribing ‘these wild reliques’ to childhood, it contradicted the portrait that immediately followed of the persona as ‘a child’ ‘amused by no such subtle toys / Of the self-watching Mind’ (see Figure 1.2). Without the Marian image, ‘Frost at Midnight’ also lost its specific political direction. If the poem does not seem to be political today, it is because the work that we are familiar with – the final version of 1829 – has had its politics erased. In the 1812 version, for example, the ‘February 1798’ dating was removed. In 1815, when Coleridge found the proof sheets of ‘Frost at Midnight’ slotted in the section for ‘Poems Occasioned by Political Events or Feelings Connected with Them’, he left this irate note for the printer: How comes this Poem here? What has it to do with Poems connected with Political Events? – I seem quite confident, that it will not be found in my arranged Catalogue of those sent to you [and] . . . must . . . be deferred till it[s] proper place among my domestic & meditative Poems’.75 ‘Frost at Midnight’ was subsequently published in Sibylline Leaves (1817), under the section for ‘Meditative Poems in Blank Verse’. Coleridge not only discarded the lines that he had introduced to the fireside scene in 1812, he entirely removed the original opposition between ‘faith’ and ‘playfulness’. Why should he, after all, strive to stage a psychodynamic that had become irrelevant to the poem? With this revision to the fireside scene, child and adult personas are no longer representative of two different mindsets but of one mentality: a predilection for animism (see Figure 1.2). The 1817 version is intellectually lighter than the original, but it is at least clear and coherent in the way that the version of 1812 never was. Set in the context of the changes that were made to other works in 1817, of which I provide further examples in Chapters 2 and 3, this bold movement on Coleridge’s part towards clarification can also be understood as characteristic. ‘Frost at Midnight’ saw publication under Coleridge’s auspices on three more occasions: in 1828, 1829 and 1834 (the year of his death). There are no significant changes for The Poetical Works of 1828, but for the second edition of


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1829, the section ‘beginning at line 20’ is once again comprehensively rewritten (see Figure 1.2). I have already registered the connection between ‘Frost at Midnight’ and The Task, which it is now pertinent to revisit – these are the lines that commence Cowper’s own fireside scene: Just when our drawing-rooms begin to blaze With lights by clear reflection multiplied From many a mirrour, in which he of Gath Goliah [sic], might have seen his giant bulk Whole without stooping, tow’ring crest and all, My pleasures too begin.76 It was the mirror imagery here that probably inspired Coleridge’s own use of ‘self-watching . . . mind’ in the original poem. Though he removed the phrase in the 1817 version, he patently re-established the relationship between ‘Frost at Midnight’ and The Task with the final revision. The persona’s mental state now perfectly echoes the mocking depictions of Cowper’s own inner processes: ‘fancy ludicrous and wild’, ‘myself creating what I saw’ and ‘indolent vacuity of thought’.77 On the issue of ‘sympathies’ between ‘Methinks’ and ‘that film’, between the subject who perceives and the object that is perceived, the fireside scene of ‘Frost at Midnight’ now proffers the mind’s inability to go beyond the Self and its constructions. The point, simply put, is that it is impossible to know. As a meditative poem, the 1829 version of ‘Frost at Midnight’ takes the ‘self-watching’ mind to a most obsessive and unproductive extreme. This negative take is surprising considering that Coleridge had been simultaneously promoting in Aids to . . . the Formation of a Manly Character, ‘the art of REFLECTION’ as the ‘one art, of which every man should be master’ (AR (CC), p. 9).78 That a congruous frame of mind is being extolled in the prose work can be inferred from the similar imagery it evokes at the outset: A reflecting mind, says an ancient writer, is the spring and source of every good thing. (“Omnis boni principium intellectus cogitabundus.”) It is at once the disgrace and the misery of men, that they live without fore-thought. Suppose yourself fronting a mirror. Now what the objects behind you are to their images at the same apparent distance before you, such is Reflection to Fore-thought. As a man without Fore-thought scarcely deserves the name of a man, so Fore-thought without Reflection is but a metaphorical phrase for the instinct of a beast. (AR (CC), pp. 12–13) How then do we square the hostility expressed in the final version of ‘Frost at Midnight’ against what Aids refers to glowingly as ‘a thinking man’ (AR (CC), p. 9)? I suspect Coleridge’s problem with the poem was not with the posture

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itself, but the politics. ‘The Christian world was for centuries divided into the Many, that did not think at all, and the Few who did nothing but think – both alike unreflecting’, he had pointed out in Aids, ‘the one from the defect of the Act, the other from the absence of an Object’ (AR (CC), p. 192). Reflection is thinking with a purpose, and if the ‘especial aim’ of Christianity is ‘to moralize the affections’ (AR (CC), p. 96) then there can really only be one ‘Object’ that would be worthy of thought: God (the one thing Aids explicitly upholds). According to Coleridge, to look upward is to grow upright; to make the ‘film’ of burning soot the focus for thought would have been no less than the perverse act of self-deformation that he had spelt out with this passage: [S]hall man alone stoop? Shall his pursuits and desires, the reflections of his inward life, be like the reflected Image of a Tree on the edge of a Pool, that grows downward, and seeks a mock heaven in the unstable element beneath it, in neighbourhood with the slim water-weeds and oozy bottom-grass that are yet better than itself and more noble, in as far as Substances that appear as Shadows are preferable to Shadows mistaken for Substance! No! it must be a higher good to make you happy. While you labor for any thing below your proper Humanity, you seek a happy Life in the region of Death. (AR (CC), pp. 118–119) The ‘Ground of the Universe’ is God, ‘an infinite omnipresent Mind’ (AR (CC), p. 85) to whom we should ultimately seek to acculturate ourselves. In ‘regenerate souls’, as Coleridge had put it, the Divine Will ‘act[s] in [our] will . . . uniting and becoming one with our will and spirit’ (AR (CC), p. 78). It is because of that that no one ‘conversant with the Volumes of Religious biography’ would fail to be struck by how the ‘men’ from ‘all ages of the Christian era bear the same characters’ (AR (CC), p. 103). In other words, we should reflect on God in order to reflect God. The persona of ‘Frost at Midnight’, in searching for ‘sympathies’ with the burning soot, has effectively chosen to abandon God. Bearing in mind the elder Coleridge’s religious outlook, it is merely appropriate that he is made to find only smoke and mirrors. Be that as it may, the final revisions to ‘Frost at Midnight’ still bother me. Assuming the preoccupations of Aids is incorporated into the 1829 version, as I have been arguing, how much of this could Coleridge reasonably expect to communicate? I doubt if any of his readers would have even connected the poem to Aids, assuming of course they had read Aids in the first pace. In short, the revisions are undeniably and problematically gnomic. Then there is the hostility underlining it all, which can only be puzzling to those who are unacquainted with his religious beliefs or who could have simply chosen to read the poem on its own terms – terms that the author himself would hardly have objected to. However, knowing Coleridge as I do, and being the inveterate historicist that I am, I sense in the excessiveness something bespeaking of a history


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that he would suppress but would nonetheless have been compelled to respond if only for himself. For could he have forgotten how the ‘thinking man’ had been led by ‘the unstable element’ amongst the flames to make, in the original poem of 1798, a ‘mock heaven’ of his wife and son? How much more galling would the memory of that Catholic image have been in 1829, with the passing in April of the Catholic Relief Bill? He was sufficiently roused by the event to write On the Constitution of Church and State, whose main argument ‘was that the Roman Catholic priesthood should not benefit from the wealth and property reserved for a national church’.79 The heart of Aids, in Coleridge’s words, is ‘the simple and sober View of . . . an infinite omnipresent Mind as the Ground of the Universe’ (AR (CC), p. 85). But if he believed ‘the Church of England to be the most Apostolic Church’ – as he stated he did at the end of the work (AR (CC), p. 381) – then, how can acculturating ourselves to this Universal Mind not also mean socializing ourselves to the dictates of the Church of England?

Chapter 2

The Submerged History of ‘The Ancient Mariner’

According to Coleridge’s footnote to ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, it ‘was on a delightful walk from Nether Stowey to Dulverton’ with William and Dorothy Wordsworth ‘in the Autumn of 1797, that this Poem was planned, and in part composed’. It is, however, a context that is provided two decades later – the first appearance of the footnote being in the 1817 version.1 Though it is not until his letter to Joseph Cottle of 28 May 1798 that an explicit reference to ‘the ancient Mariner’ is made (CL, I, p. 412), as early as 20 November 1797, Dorothy had recorded ‘William and Coleridge employing themselves in laying the plan of a ballad; to be published with some pieces of Williams’ (WL, I, p. 194). While he did announce the completion of ‘a ballad’ shortly after Dorothy’s correspondence, at ‘about 300 lines’ (CL, I, p. 357) the work is clearly different from the 658-line version that was first published in 1798. My purpose here is not to debate the origins of ‘The Ancient Mariner’, but to highlight the way in which we are dependent upon the Wordsworths for the early evidence, instead of Coleridge, who remained comparatively silent and vague. Coleridge’s references to ‘The Ancient Mariner’, however, proliferate in his later life. In Biographia Literaria, also published in 1817, he had actually made the following announcement: Whatever more than this, I shall think it fit to declare concerning the powers and privileges of the imagination in the present work, will be found in the critical essay on the uses of the Supernatural in poetry and the principles that regulate its introduction: which the reader will find prefixed to the poem of The Ancient Mariner. (BL (CC), I, p. 306) No such ‘essay’ was published, nor has any manuscript survived, so was this oversight the result of a work he intended to write but did not or had he again decided to reserve comment? In fact, he did not discuss the poem to any great detail until the Table Talk years.


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Coleridge’s best-known remark on ‘The Ancient Mariner’ was noted on 31 May 1830: MRS. BARBAULD once told me that she admired the Ancient Mariner very much, but that there were two faults in it, – it was improbable, and had no moral. As for the probability, I owned that that might admit some question; but as to the want of a moral, I told her that in my own judgement the poem had too much; and that the only, or chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a work of such pure imagination. (TT (CC), II, p. 100) There seems something overly determining about ‘pure’; every scholar on Coleridge knows what resonance the word ‘imagination’ already held for him. In The Road to Xanadu (1927), John Livingstone Lowes is sufficiently disturbed by the implications to write: [A] work of pure imagination is not something fabricated by a tour de force from nothing, and suspended, without anchorage in fact, in the impalpable ether of a visionary world. No conception could run more sharply counter to the truth. And I question, in the light of all that is now before us, whether any other poem in English is so closely compacted out of fact, or so steeped in the thought and instinct with the action which characterized its time.2 Lowes’s appeal to the poem’s historical validity is, at its heart, an appeal against the concept of an autonomous imagination. ‘The shaping spirit of imagination must have materials on which to work’ and Coleridge’s drew on the resources of ‘a memory steeped in travel-lore’ and ‘brute fact’.3 My problem with Lowes is not the historicity of the imagination per se, but with the critic’s imposition of the idea as Coleridge’s own. Conceptually, its closest cousin in Biographia Literaria is the ‘Fancy’, which is described as ‘a mode of Memory’ playing with the fixed and definite ‘counters’ of ‘materials ready made from the law of association’ (BL (CC), I, p. 305). Coleridge’s ‘IMAGINATION’ is only tangentially connected to external reality however, with the most reified form being not only autonomous but transcendentally so: ‘I hold [it] to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’ (BL (CC), I, p. 304). To stand Coleridge’s argument on its head, his appeal to an autonomous imagination is at its heart an appeal against the poem’s historical connections. The allowance he made for historical referents – ‘the order of time and space’, ‘empirical phenomenon’ and the decision-making process – all enter under his distinction of the ‘Fancy’, a manifestly separate and inferior category. If Coleridge saw the imagination as profoundly a-historical in its highest form,

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then, insofar as the inescapability of History is a truth, his glorification of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ as a work of ‘pure imagination’ would – taken to its logical extreme – lead to a denial of its history. This is a framework for understanding his unwillingness to admit his literary debt to Shelvocke’s Voyage round the World (1726), his extraordinary claim, ‘“The Ancient Mariner” cannot be imitated’, as well as his privileging of the poem’s non-historical elements such as the Supernatural. Indeed, Coleridge’s subtitle to the 1800 version – ‘A POET’s REVERIE’ – seems to affirm what Lowes rejects: that his ideal of an imaginative work is ‘something fabricated by a tour de force from’ – in this case at least – ‘the impalpable ether of a visionary world’. Lowes is not the first to react against the implications of Coleridge’s denial; Charles Lamb had fewer illusions when he wrote to Wordsworth a month after the publication of the 1800 version: I am sorry that Coleridge has christened his Ancient Marinere ‘a Poet’s Reverie’ – it is as bad as Bottom the Weaver’s declaration that he is not a Lion but only the scenical representation of a Lion. What new idea is gained by this Title, but one subversive of all credit, which the Tale should force upon us, of its truth? (LL, I, p. 266) Though Coleridge subsequently withdrew the subtitle, what he said about ‘The Ancient Mariner’ in his later years (when he decided to talk about it) is clearly even more extreme. Detractors, such as Thomas De Quincey, simply dismissed the denial of the poem’s literary inheritance as a lie. Following Coleridge’s death in 1834, De Quincey wrote a series of articles for Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine portraying him as a frequent plagiarist. Henry Nelson Coleridge responded by issuing, in the 1835 edition of Table Talk, a lengthy defence that appealed like Lowes to an evident historicity of the imagination. The process of composing an imaginative work involves – in the words of the nephew – what every common person, who has read half a dozen [standard]4 books in his life, knows, – that thoughts, words, and phrases, not our own, rise up day by day, from the depths of the passive memory, and suggest themselves . . . without any effort of recollection. (TT (CC), II, p. 21) If ‘The Ancient Mariner’ owed any obligation to ‘Shelvocke’s Voyage’, the nephew declared, ‘I firmly believe he had no recollection of it’ (TT (CC), II, p. 21). The testimonial did not convince Wordsworth, whose personal copy of Table Talk is at this precise juncture thus annotated: ‘Coleridge knew perfectly well . . . I suggested it to him myself, when the Poem was planned’ (TT (CC), II, p. 21 footnote 14). In no other writer has the question of originality been such an issue for his contemporaries, with the cut-and-thrust between admirers and detractors


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involving a large number of publications. The charges of plagiarism by Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine and the Edinburgh Review are even more extraordinary for having taken place posthumously when a more sympathetic response might have been expected. Perhaps the problem is not so much the scope of Coleridge’s plagiarism as his stubborn insistence on an autonomous, originating imagination that he himself had popularized. He was by his measure measured, and, since writers must be first readers, his detractors could not but find him wanting. Wrong as Lowes was about Coleridge’s idea of the imagination, he was not wrong about the especial historicity of ‘The Ancient Mariner’. I will demonstrate just how ‘steeped in the thought and instinct . . . which characterized its time’ the poem that first appeared in the anonymously published Lyrical Ballads of 1798 was.5

2.1 ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ (1798)6 From William Empson’s ‘Introduction’ to Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Selected Poetry (1972), to Debbie Lee’s Slavery and the Romantic Imagination (2002) – the historicist explanation of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ invariably returns to the encounter with the spectral ship in book 3.7 As the first undoubtedly supernatural occurrence in a poem focusing on ‘strange things’ (according to the prefatory ‘Argument’), and as the episode with the highest human cost (resulting in the death of all the Mariner’s shipmates), its thematic importance is obvious. The historical exegesis is currently mobilized around three outstanding images: the spectral ship and the two enigmatic figures that make up its crew. Let’s begin with the Mariner’s description of the ‘Spectre-ship’: She doth not tack from side to side – Hither to work us weal Withouten wind, withouten tide She steddies with upright keel. The Western wave was all a flame, The day was well nigh done! Almost upon the western wave Rested the broad bright Sun; When that strange shape drove suddenly Betwixt us and the Sun. And strait the Sun was fleck’d with bars (Heaven’s mother send us grace) As if thro’ a dungeon grate he peer’d With broad and burning face.

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Coleridge, Revision and Romanticism Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud) How fast she neres and neres! Are those her Sails that glance in the Sun Like restless gossameres? Are these her naked ribs, which fleck’d The sun that did behind them peer? And are these two all, all the crew, That woman and her fleshless Pheere?8

The image of the approaching vessel as a great gate attended by a ‘woman and her fleshless Pheere’ has echoes of Milton’s hell-gate and its enigmatic guardians: Sin and Death (in Paradise Lost). While this might do for establishing Coleridge’s imagery as a re-creation, given that more than a century divides Paradise Lost from ‘The Ancient Mariner’, literary inheritance alone is, arguably, insufficient to understand the precise terms of his imaginative reconstruction. Patrick J. Keane closes the historical gap by connecting the spectral ship as an image of imprisonment with ‘The Dungeon’,9 which Coleridge published along with ‘The Ancient Mariner’ in Lyrical Ballads. His friend, Wordsworth, also printed a prison-related poem in the 1798 volume: ‘The Convict’. Indeed, Coleridge’s arrangement in imaginative space of the sun peering ‘thro’ a dungeon grate’ at the unfortunate Mariner has a parallel situation in Wordsworth’s own ‘I pause; and at length, through the glimmering grate, / That outcast of pity behold’.10 ‘The Convict’ had already been published in the Morning Post on 14 December 1797. For Wordsworth to reprint the poem within a space of ten months, before dropping it altogether – it was never again re-issued under his authority after the 1798 Lyrical Ballads – is indicative of the topicality of prisons and prisoners. If the search browser for the ESTC is used to count the number of publications on the nation’s jails in each year of the eighteenth century, a sudden surge from 1795 to 1799 with 1800 marking the tail end of this spike will be found.11 It is significant then that ‘The Dungeon’ itself survives only until the 1800 edition before it too is dropped. Even so, why should the cultural interest in prisons be reflected in a poem of nautical matters such as ‘The Ancient Mariner’? The Monthly, which reviewed the Lyrical Ballads in 1799, had objected to ‘The Dungeon’ on these grounds: Here the candour and tenderness for criminals seem pushed to excess. Have not jails been built on the humane Mr. Howard’s plan, which have almost ruined some counties, and which look more like palaces than habitations for the perpetrators of crimes? Yet, have fewer crimes been committed in consequence of the erection of those magnificent structures, at an expence which would have maintained many in innocence and comfort out of a jail . . . ?12


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If ‘The Convict’ is a realization of ‘Godwinian humanitarianism’, as Ernest de Selincourt suggests, then Coleridge’s portrait of ‘The Dungeon’ may be said to be a realization of ‘the humane Mr. Howard’. Many of the lines have a counterpart in the depictions of John Howard’s The State of the Prisons in England and Wales. The terrible conditions were merely one facet of the problem, for as far as their filth made them hotbeds of disease, Howard was alarmed by the capacity of the discharged prisoners to spread infection – and here is where ‘nautical matters’ come in: Dr. Lind, physician to the royal hospital at Haslar, near Portsmouth, shewed me in one of the wards a number of sailors ill of the goal-fever, brought on board their ship by a man who had been discharged from a prison in London. The ship was laid up on the occasion. That gentleman, in his Essay on the Health of Seamen, asserts, that ‘The source of infection to our armies and fleets is undoubtedly the jails; we can often trace the importers of it directly from them. – It often proves fatal in impressing men on the hasty equipment of a fleet. – The first English fleet sent last war to America, lost by it above two thousand men’. In another place he assures us, that ‘the seeds of infection were carried from the guard-ships into our squadrons – and the mortality, thence occasioned, was greater than by all other diseases or means of death put together’.13 The immediate context of Howard’s book (published in 1777) may be the American war. Nevertheless, its republication in 1792 by Johnson – the same person who was to bring out Coleridge’s quarto volume on England and the French revolution, Fears in Solitude – was timely, in view of the impending conflict with France; for one thing had not changed in both wars: entry into the Navy was in many cases the punishment of choice for civil offences. So great was the urgency to fill the ships for war that Parliament passed the Quota Acts of 1795, under which the seaside counties had to raise a predetermined number of men each year or face an embargo on British shipping using their ports. Those so raised for the Navy were known as Lord Mayors’ Men, partly because criminals filled the requirements of the quota. Edward Brenton, a serving officer at the time, wrote: The quota-bounty, given in 1795, 1796, and 1797, we conceive to have been the most ill-advised and fatal measure ever adopted by the Government for manning the fleet. The seamen who voluntarily enlisted in 1793, and fought some of the most glorious of our battles, received the comparatively small bounty of £5. These brave fellows saw men, totally ignorant of the profession, the very refuse and outcasts of society, fleeing from justice and the vengeance of the law, come on board with bounty to the amount of £70.14

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Considering the unprecedented traffic this new measure generated between prisons and ships, from discharged criminals as well as convicted men temporarily housed in the prisons, or in prison-like conditions of the press tenders and receiving ships, this could have been ‘fatal’ to the fullest sense of the word.15 To return to the description of the ‘Spectre-ship’, note that it is not the vessel’s supernatural nature – its ability to travel ‘Withouten wind, withouten tide’ – but rather the Mariner’s perception of it as ‘a dungeon grate’ that is pivotal in changing his assessment of it, from an approaching ‘weal’ to a premonition of woe. Even if imprisonment is the specific historical nuance underlying that key image, it still does not explain why the sighting of the ship evokes within him a fear of entrapment. It is a striking coincidence that the greatest nautical poem in English Literature is composed at the moment of the greatest crisis in English naval history – the mutinies at Spithead and the Nore in 1797. The first rebellion began on 14 April, when in response to orders sent down to Spithead for Lord Bridport’s fleet to sail, ‘The Crews of all the ships, to a man, declared that they would not go to sea, unless their pay was increased eight shillings per month’.16 Coleridge’s newspaper carried the general mood: We cannot contemplate this mutiny among our seamen without the most awful emotions. The seamen will probably triumph, and if they do, there is an end of all the charm, of all the discipline which has rendered our fleets superior to all the world. If once the seamen find that they can obtain whatever they ask by a general mutiny, they will mutiny often . . . [a] general mutiny in a fleet for wages, never occurred before in the History of England. It seems a new æra, and we fear it is not a very auspicious one.17 ‘The seamen’ did ‘triumph’, and their success inspired a second general mutiny at the Nore in June. During these months, the condition of the British sailor was at the forefront of national attention. The humble Petition of the Seaman and Marines (1797) – the address to Parliament by the Spithead mutineers – was, for example, published in full by the major London papers. Aside from matters of pay this letter requested better food, better care for ‘the state of the sick’, and the humane granting of leave to visit loved ones. Navy men were virtually prisoners in their ships. Government succeeded government, but none of them ever devised a scheme for selection or length of service. To quote Michael A. Lewis: All were content to send out their press-gangs to gather men in promiscuously: if necessary, to knock them silly with a cudgel or the flat of a cutlass, and bundle them on board as mere prisoners: prisoners, moreover, without a trial and with no time-limit set upon their sentence save only the duration of the war.18


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Samuel Johnson had pronounced life on board a naval vessel to be worse than being in prison. He said, ‘No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned’ – and at another time, ‘A man in jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company’. Dr. Johnson’s opposition to naval service was well known and documented in James Boswell’s biography,19 which ran through four editions during the 1790s. In any case, there was a plain association between ships and prisons: ships were used as prisons. These floating jailhouses – commonly called ‘hulks’ – were moored in the Thames constituting a prominent feature in the landscape. To impose the immediate context onto the poem: the Mariner fears that the ship approaching them may be a military vessel. For war service in the militia there was a ballot that gave to each individual a chance of having to serve, and a chance of escaping service. Though sometimes rigged, its net was wide covering all walks of life. In the Navy, however, this liability fell solely on one class: the seafaring community. Given the limited pool, and the record numbers of sailors and marines that Parliament was voting year on year – 100,000 in 1795, increasing regularly until the peak of 135,000 in 1801 – the seaman had virtually no chance of escaping save by sheer personal evasion. The Mariner and his shipmates were safe enough setting off from harbour in book 1, since it was the law that outward bound ships might not be boarded, but in book 3 far away from home waters they were fair game for any English warship short of men. Encountering a French privateer was no better as it usually meant the confiscation of ship and cargo, as well as confinement on board a prison transport. The fear of military vessels was, in a real sense, common to every free sailor since the maritime powers may have been less than particular about the nationality of those whom they took. English warships certainly pressed sailors on foreign vessels: it is estimated that on average 15 per cent of their crew may have been of an alien origin.20 But there is more: the very freedom the Mariner and his crew enjoy throws an interesting indeterminacy over their exact nature. In featuring a crew without a captain, indeed, without any distinct hierarchical structure at all, it is tempting to speculate that Coleridge’s inspiration is again historical. A common feature of the mutinies in April and June was the wholesale expulsion of the officers by their crew. We know from our historical accounts that the Nore mutineers lost the sympathy of those onshore and were eventually suppressed, with the ringleader – Richard Parker – and 29 others hanged.21 We also know that as events were taking a turn for the worse, there had been a proposal by the more extreme elements led by William Gregory to bolt for other shores. Many had wanted to go to Bantry Bay, a few to the West Indies – where there was ‘wood, wine, and water’ – or this mysterious haven its proponents would only identify as the ‘New Colony’. The movement was popular enough to alarm Parker, who ordered on 7 June:

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Coleridge, Revision and Romanticism That no ship shall move from its place at the Nore till the expiration of 54 hours allowed Lord Northesk to bring an answer to their demands and that a boat from each ship shall keep a guard during the night to prevent such a separation.

Acting on the possible threat that the mutineers might escape, or turn the ships over to the French, Trinity House arranged the removal of the buoys and beacon lights of the passage out to sea. Coleridge’s seamen may be mutineers sailing away to some tropical paradise in the Americas with ‘wood, wine, and water’. Their democratic organization indicates they could be smugglers as well, or – since the poem is set in an earlier age – pirates. Still, whether they are mutineers fleeing the vengeance of military law, or conveyors of contraband, they will have much to lose from an encounter with a military vessel. The Lyrical Ballads was, arguably, marked by the social consciousness of the situation of England’s naval seamen. Howard and James Lind were among the many to touch upon the relationship between prisons and ships. Charles Fletcher, a naval surgeon, has a useful summary of the main issues: [T]here is . . . [an] intimate connexion between the navy and prisons; the former, in war-time, especially, necessarily deriving part of its strength* from the latter: Therefore, considered in a political point of view, the state of prisoners cannot be too much attended to. *And I may add, part of its destruction too. Prisons are a nidus of contagion, not only to fleets but armies.22 Aside from the interest in prisons and prisoners demonstrated by ‘The Dungeon’ and ‘The Convict’, there was ‘Old Man Travelling’, a portrait of a father hurrying to Falmouth hospital to be with his son, ‘a mariner’ mortally wounded ‘from a sea-fight’.23 ‘The Female Vagrant’ expresses the appalling conditions on board the receiving ships and transports through a shipboard wife and mother: There foul neglect for months and months we bore, Nor yet the crowded fleet its anchor stirred. Green fields before us and our native shore, By fever, from polluted air incurred, Ravage was made, for which no knell was heard.24 Wordsworth’s female counterpart to Coleridge’s homeless Mariner eventually loses her whole family, and it is a loss that has as much to do with direct conflict as with their unhealthy living conditions – ‘Husband and children! one by one, by sword / And ravenous plague, all perished’. Given the circumstances by which naval seamen were raised, and how they were expected to live and


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perform, it was simply appropriate that in ‘The Ancient Mariner’ the prospect of entrapment should be succeeded by the spectres of death and disease. The original ghastly crew were nameless: they were only recognized as ‘DEATH’ and ‘LIFE-IN-DEATH’ from the 1817 version after the entire section had undergone extensive revision. Here are their original 1798 portraits: His bones were black with many a crack, All black and bare, I ween; Jet-black and bare, save wherewith rust Of mouldy damps and charnel crust They’re patch’d with purple and green. Her lips are red, her looks are free, Her locks are yellow as gold: Her skin was as white as leprosy, And she is far liker Death than he; Her flesh made the still air cold.25 Though it was not until the 1817 version that Coleridge dropped the portrait of ‘Death’ as a black-boned skeleton, his yellow-haired companion had been impinging upon him right from the first. She is ‘far liker Death than he’. Nevertheless, as the syntax simultaneously clarifies, she is not ‘Death’. That the female spectre is imagined in association with leprosy is significant. It is the traditional image of the diseased individual, and at the level of semantics connectable with another nautical issue. Howard is again involved. In An Account of the Principal Lazarettos in Europe (1789), he had proposed the building of ‘lazarettos’ – or quarantine stations – in England to control the spread of infectious diseases facilitated through maritime trade. ‘Lazar’ is, of course, an archaic word for ‘leper’ (OED, VIII, p. 738); besides, quarantine itself as a practice can be traced back to the early attempts to isolate such a person. Howard died in 1790, but the interest he aroused in this procedure is confirmed by the decision of his London publishers to bring out a second edition of the work in 1791. Sir Gilbert Blane – the leading authority on naval hygiene and medicine – took up the subject of quarantine in the late 1790s,26 until 28 July 1800, when the construction of these facilities was officially endorsed by Parliament.27 Coleridge’s use of similes in the description of the female spectre is of key importance. This device by indicating what she is similar to and yet not, may be used as a sort of Rosetta stone to read her. Assuming she represents a disease, if not leprosy then what type of disease is she? It is in the interest of the poet to maintain a degree of semantic flexibility – to make an analogy out of the religious paintings of the Renaissance: the generic representation of the Madonna subsumes the specific identity of the sitter.28 This may be a conscious suppression, or it may have simply come about as a fact of a distanced and continually distancing historical context. Even if Coleridge had a specific

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disease in mind, what were overt pointers to one age can seem hopelessly vague to another. To recover the identity of Coleridge’s female spectre, we need to measure our readings of her in relation to the immediate circumstances that give and receive her meanings. Leprosy was not normally associated with a seafaring life; the five diseases that had connections with maritime activity were scurvy, venereal disease, the plague, typhus and yellow fever. If the female spectre is implicated in the deaths of the Mariner’s shipmates, then, to read her in terms of a disease, venereal disease can be dropped on the basis of her sheer lethalness. The first ‘strange’ incident also results in a transmission of characteristics: the vessel acquires the ability to move without the aid of wind or tide – by book 7 it begins to look like the Spectre-ship in having ‘sails’ as ‘thin . . . and sere’ as the ‘skeletons of leaves’.29 If this implies she is a contagious disease then scurvy too can be dropped, which leaves us with the plague, typhus and yellow fever. These three diseases were notorious for their lethalness and transmissibility, but England has remained virtually plaguefree since 1680. Typhus – Howard’s ‘goal fever’, which the late eighteenth century called ‘infectious ship fever . . . jail and hospital fever’ depending on the location of the outbreak – was the more immediate concern. However, as an incident occurring in ‘the tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean’,30 it runs against the prevailing medical consensus. This position is authoritatively set out in Blane’s Observations on the Diseases Incident to Seamen (1785): I have seen so many instances of filth and crowding in ships and hospitals in the West Indies, without contagion being produced, and which in Europe could hardly have failed to produce it, or to render it more malignant, that I am convinced there is something in tropical climates unfavourable to the production and continuance of [typhus] . . . The ships which bring this fever from Europe in general get rid of it soon after arriving in a warm climate . . .31 The undisputed killer of seamen ‘in a warm climate’ was yellow fever. As Elliot Arthy indicated in The Seaman’s Medical Advocate (1798), ‘physicians’ referred to it as ‘the Remittent Fever of Tropical climates’ because they ‘found [it] to be the grand and universally prevailing disease, within those latitudes, all round the world’.32 The yellowness of the female spectre is unlikely to be accidental. At a time when ‘the Remittent Fever of Tropical climates’ was pervasive, might the colour have acquired a specific connotation especially as the disease so distinctively caused the skin and eyes of its victims to yellow? The yellow flag is still relevant today as the standard nautical signal for infectious illness, being hoisted on quarantine stations. Coleridge did not, however, commit himself to a definite signing of the female spectre as yellow fever: she is blonde rather than


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jaundiced and endowed with a pale skin – a suitably general symptom of ill health for a generic representation. As for the male spectre, though the use of a skeletal figure to personify Death is cliché, the fact that he has not been labelled as such does allow an appealing alternative: he too may be a disease. If so, his dungeon-like appearance (‘Jet-black and bare, save wherewith rust / Of mouldy damps and charnel crust’) suggests he must be that fever of the jails – typhus. Rereading the ghastly pair from this perspective, it suddenly becomes understandable why the Mariner should perceive the female spectre to be the ‘far liker Death’. According to the ESTC, ten out of the eighteen specialist treatises on yellow fever in the eighteenth century were produced in the last eight years alone. The year of Coleridge’s nautical poem – 1798 – was the year when the number of these publications hit their peak.33 This interest in yellow fever may be correlated with the epidemics in the West Indies, where – from 1793 to 1796 – combined losses of the army and navy averaged as high as 35,000 annually. The disease came on in waves hitting ships, even whole fleets, with spectacular force. Bartholomew James, who was there during an outbreak in 1794, has left some account of it. In a few days after I arrived at St. Pierre [Martinique] I buried every man belonging to my boat twice, and nearly all the third boat’s crew, in fevers, and, shocking and serious to relate, the Master, Mate, and every man belonging to the Acorn transport that I came from England in . . . On board the Brodrick transport the fever raged with such violence that the Mate, the sole survivor, was obliged to send his boat on shore to fetch off Negroes to throw the dead overboard, and himself died soon after. ‘[O]ut of about 10,000 soldiers and sailors which left Europe in the fleet from Spithead on November 27th, 1793’, James ‘was one of about 500 that ever lived to see again this happy shore’.34 The devastating effect of the West Indian yellow fever epidemics was repeatedly alluded to in the field of naval medicine. Thomas Trotter, in Medicina Nautica: An Essay on the Diseases of Seamen (1797) recorded: THE ravages which this fatal Disease have made, during the present war, in our fleets and armies, are beyond all precedent: the insidious mode of attack, and the rapid strides by which it advances to an incurable stage, point it out as one of the most formidable opponents of medical skill. It has offered the severest obstacles to military operations, which the history of modern warfare can produce: the chief victims of its fury being the young, the robust, and those free from other diseases; by which means a campaign in the West Indies is now considered as little better than forlorn hope.35

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So serious were these epidemics that in the months running up to the writing of ‘The Ancient Mariner’, a motion was raised in Parliament requesting the withdrawal of English troops from St Domingo. Coleridge’s favourite newspaper – The Morning Chronicle – carried a full report on this on 19 May 1797. The literature that we know he read does not entirely escape either; in a review for the Critical, Coleridge quoted a poem that included the following stanza: Where Indian suns engender new diseases, Where snakes and tigers breed, I bend my way, To brave the feverish thirst no art appeases, The yellow plague, and madding blaze of day. (SW & F (CC), II, p. 64)36 The errant crew of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ meets the ‘yellow . . . Death’ under exactly the same conditions. Yellow fever is the closest historical correlative to the mass devastation experienced by the Mariner.37 That his shipmates die by nightfall is in line with the medical opinion of the day: ‘the disease . . . soon runs its course, terminating either in health or death in a few days, and often indeed in a few hours’.38 However, death was not the only possible outcome. The first attack of the Yellow Fever that a European has . . . commonly called a seasoning, which, when very violent, though the person recover, is not to be regarded as favourable, in as much as it generally impairs his constitution so much as to render him . . . susceptible of periodical relapses, which, at length, sap his stamina so much as to leave him little or no enjoyment, nor chance for his life . . .39 Tall, browned and so emaciated that he has to assure the wedding guest that ‘This body dropt not down’40 – the inspiration for Coleridge’s Mariner is surely the sunburnt and diseased-ravaged body of a naval or military man discharged in ever increasing numbers onto the English landscape. The ‘frequent and periodical relapses’ – or ‘habitual agues’41 – suffered by these survivors are a perfect match for the symptoms of the Mariner’s compulsive tale telling: Since then at an uncertain hour, Now oftimes and now fewer, That anguish comes and makes me tell My ghastly aventure.42 Though the yellow fever patient may require a lengthy period of convalescence, it must be said that the Mariner’s ailment bears a closer resemblance to malaria whose after-effects can be life-long. But malaria and yellow fever were not recognized as separate diseases until the last decades of the nineteenth century.


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Now, a rather pedantic question for us to reconsider the male spectre: why are his bones black? The historicist exposition is still mainly preoccupied with the poem’s connections with the Slave Trade.43 To add to the penumbrae of possible linguistic pointers to slavery: the colour of the skeleton like the yellowness of the female spectre may be another identifying gesture. This does not go quite far enough since whatever the skin colour bones are white. To proceed, we shall return to the fertile field of historical resonance. England depended on the West Indies for sugar. A commodity that was notoriously produced by slave labour, it might have been regarded as something of a health hazard as well for there were medical practitioners who actually blamed the ‘sugar-ships’ for the epidemics in the region. The Seaman’s Medical Advocate: The vapour or steam arising from the sugars so diffused itself throughout the ship, and was so penetrating a nature, that it changed the paint-work, in every part and of every colour, black, or, rather, made it look as if it had been smeared over with black lead . . . This vapour or steam arising from new sugars, when such considerable quantities are together on ship-board, I have heard said to be productive of the Yellow Fever among seamen.44 The male spectre, with his bones blackened by the vapour of caramelizing sugars, may be a death-sign for the Sugar Trade. Alternatively, a skeleton could be made ‘black with many a crack’ by being burnt: the remains of war. At the commencement of hostilities with France, Pitt and Dundas adopted the traditional strategic policy of seizing the Sugar Islands. Sir John Jervis was sent out with 15 ships and General Charles Grey with 7,000 troops to capture Martinique, Guadeloupe and St Lucia. Success was achieved in May 1794, but consolidating these gains proved a totally different matter. The islands were to change hands over the next two years for on top of the French, there was a slave population emboldened by French promises of independence to contend with. In the reports on the ever more costly campaign in the West Indies, news of slave uprisings were arranged beside those of yellow fever – for example: We are sorry to learn by private letters from Jamaica, that the MAROONS are again appearing in force. The troops are about to march against them, and we trust our next accounts will state that they are dispersed. Other letters state, that the yellow fever has already proved destructive to many of the inhabitants of the Island.45 It is tempting to speculate that the Mariner’s ship heads west across the Atlantic, then south to round Cape Horn to reach the Pacific Ocean. It was the route of the Speedwell as related by George Shelvocke, captain and author of A Voyage Round the World, which Wordsworth belatedly insisted in 1843 was the ‘germ’ of ‘The Ancient Mariner’. This remained the most direct route to

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the Pacific Ocean, and there is a manifest similarity between what takes place in the poem and Shelvocke’s experiences at the tip of South America: Add to this our misfortune of having continual misty weather, which laid us under hourly apprehensions of falling foul of islands of ice . . . The cold is certainly much more insupportable in these, than in the same Latitudes to the Northward . . . one would think it impossible that any thing living could subsist in so rigid a climate; and, indeed, we all observed, that we had not had the sight of one fish of any kind, since we were come to the Southward of the streights of le Mair, nor one sea-bird, except a disconsolate black Albitross . . .46 If the Mariner’s ship heads west towards the Americas, to impose the immediate context onto the poem, it will inevitably enter yellow fever territory. The disease had hit all the obvious stopping points along such a journey, including the ports of Boston, New York and Philadelphia. The year 1798 was also the year of yellow fever in America, with the ESTC recording its greatest number of books on the subject in that year.47 Despite the attention, little was known about the disease. A mixture of much vagueness, controversy and mythology obscured what few nuggets of insight there were. This problem is clear enough when we examine what is made of its cause and mode of transmission. There were proponents of miasma, like Elliot Arthy, who theorized that yellow fever was the result of an exposure to tropical air impregnated by the harmful ‘effluvia . . . from putrid animal and vegetable matter’.48 A ship did not have to touch shore to get infected, for they believed that these exhalations were carried over considerable distances by the wind. Blane, a proponent of contagion, attributed a far more limited range to yellow fever. Diseases, he wrote, resembled ‘poisons’. Some, ‘such as that of the bite of a mad dog, and that of venereal disease . . . require actual contact’; while others – such as the plague, smallpox and fevers – may be ‘more volatile’, but even ‘these do not extend . . . above a few yards’.49 If a typology of infection were read into the encounter with the spectral ship they would have almost textbook conditions for the spread of yellow fever, whether by contagion or transmitted by miasma. For ‘alongside came’ the spectral ship, close enough for the Mariner to see that ‘the Twain were playing dice’ – close enough, perhaps, to catch a contagious disease? Additionally, at that fateful moment, A guste of wind sterte up behind And whistled thro’ his bones; Thro’ the holes of his eyes and the hole of his mouth Half-whistles and half-groans.50 Tropical in nature, and – to impose a typology of miasma – literally blowing over ‘putrid animal and vegetable matter’: surely an ill wind. A personification


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of yellow fever as female, or as African would have been equally appropriate. Owing to the demography of the colonial presence in the West Indies, its victims were overwhelmingly European men. Historical accident gave rise to the myth that the disease never attacked Africans, or women, a myth that had Blane himself half-convinced.51 That Coleridge’s seamen receive their infection from another ship is in line too with medical thinking: it is Blane who first proves the capacity of yellow fever to spread from ship to ship.52 More of the same may be found in Southey’s Poems of 1797. A case in point is the ode ‘To the Genius of Africa’, in which ships literally bring death and disease. This poem, which Coleridge praised in a letter to the author as ‘perfect’ (CL, I, p. 290), evokes a scene that recalls the great epidemics of the West Indies: Dash their proud navies on the shore; And where their armies claim’d the fight Wither’d the warrior’s might; And o’er the unholy host with baneful breath There Genius thou hast breath’d the gales of Death.53 It is important to note from the use of the past tense that the above portrait is couched in terms of what has already occurred. If the passage implies an African origin to yellow fever so much the better, for it would again be an elaboration of a contemporary perception.54 The poem ends by predicting the fall of the continent’s colonial oppressors; never mind if the abstract personifications hinder understanding of how this process will come about, for Southey’s ode ‘To Horror’ returns to the prophecy in more concrete terms: HORROR! I call thee yet once more! Bear me to that accursed shore Where round the stake the impaled Negro writhes. Assume thy sacred terrors then! Dispense The blasting gales of Pestilence! Arouse the race of Afric! holy Power, Lead them to vengeance! and in that dread hour When Ruin rages wide I will behold and smile by MERCY’s side.55 Epidemics and a general uprising by the natives will free Africa. Provocative stuff, particularly when we consider what was happening in the West Indies at the time of the publication. Southey’s Poems offer connections between ships and prisons as well. The ‘Botany-bay Eclogues’, for instance, explore the experience of convicts transported to Australia. In the third piece, ‘John, Samuel, & Richard’, it is the realities of impressment that find expression in a seaman’s

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lament that ‘[t]he sailor has no place of safety in store – / From the tempest at sea, to the press-gang on shore’.56 My point is that there is nothing exceptional about the contemporaneity of ‘The Ancient Mariner’. Topical allusions in verse to the Slave Trade, to various aspects of the war, to everything that has been so far dealt with were simply the order of the day.57 Many of the seemingly incidental details provided by the poem have definite historical correlatives. The ‘biscuit-worms’ fed to the albatross were still a problem in Coleridge’s time;58 indeed, bread weevils continued to be a problem until hard tack was supplied in airtight tins more than a century later. There is even a historical basis to the hanging of the dead albatross around the Mariner’s neck,59 it being one of the ‘Rules of Discipline’ in the Royal Navy that ‘[i]f any shall be heard to Swear, Curse, or Blaspheme the Name of GOD, the Captain is strictly required to punish them for every Offence, by causing them to wear a wooden collar, or some other shameful Badge of Distinction, for so long a Time as he shall judge proper’.60 Finally, we may read a typology of impressment into the replacement of the shipmates by spirits.61 It was the boat-borne gangs who harvested the most men for the navy, usually from the inward-bound merchant ships. Since there was a monetary reward for every seaman procured the practice was to gather as many as possible, with the press officer leaving his own men to work the ship to its destination. The surrogate sailors were called ‘ticketmen’ and had to be very trustworthy, because they would obviously have many opportunities to desert. During the Revolutionary phase of the war, a regular class of them known as ‘men in lieu’ were to make this temporary substituting a full-time job. Carried around in the press-tenders for the sole purpose of replacing pressed men, these were of poor quality: many merchant ships met their end on the coasts of Britain because of them.62 The aim of the crew that replaces the Mariner’s shipmates is to bring the ship home. This anxiety that they engender is comparable to the feelings ‘ticket-men’ doubtlessly instilled in the 1790s: imagine the captain of an impressed ship wondering whether the alien sailors were professional seamen or hazardous ‘men in lieu’. Would the spirit crew seem less formidable an imaginative leap from ‘ticket-men’ when we take into account the fact that the pressgangs were denounced as ‘body snatchers’?63 The prominence accorded to ‘The Ancient Mariner’ by the Naval Chronicle in 1799 is a testimony of the poem’s historical connections. In the section devoted to ‘NAVAL POETRY’, it received a first-placed recognition.64 The only poem selected from the Lyrical Ballads of 1798 for commentary, it won unqualified praise from the reviewer who also justified the supernaturalism of ‘The Ancient Mariner’: To an accurate observer, Superstition will generally be seen more or less prevalent in our character: it is the Weed of a religious Mind; and though it must ever wither before the clear light of reason, yet so great is our predilection for supernatural agency, that whatever has a tendency to the marvellous is readily received and liberally encouraged.65


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I have shown how resonant the poem was historically, as an echo of a specific context and as a distinctive voice that readers responded to. But what of Coleridge himself: is there any evidence that directly implicates him in the historicity of the poem? Below is an anecdote from Thomas Allsop’s Letters, Conversations and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge (1836): When I expressed a hope that 3000 [copies of the Lyrical Ballads] might be circulated, Wordsworth spurned at the idea, and said that twenty times that number must be sold. I was told by Longmans that the greater part of the Lyrical Ballads had been sold to seafaring men, who having heard of the Ancient Mariner, concluded that it was a naval song-book, or, at all events, that it had some relation to nautical matters. (TT (CC), II, p. 375) It is dated ‘after 15 September 1821’; now, while Allsop’s dating is notoriously unreliable, there is no mistaking these exaggerated pronouncements on ‘The Ancient Mariner’ as the stuff of Coleridge’s later years. More to the point, they demonstrate his awareness at least of the poem’s nautical connections. The information is, however, signed by deflection – ‘I was told by Longmans’ etc – and any historical relevance is disowned as coincidence; nevertheless, coming from the later Coleridge, it is probably as good an admission of the poem’s historicity that historicists should hope for.

2.2 ‘The Ancient Mariner, a Poet’s Reverie’ (1800) The Lyrical Ballads of 1798 was a joint and equal project by Wordsworth and Coleridge. That Coleridge’s poetical output accounted for merely a third of the volume is irrelevant. For The Fall of Robespierre, a separate collaboration with Southey, he had appeared as the sole author despite having written only one of the play’s three acts. While he did not enjoy the same privilege for the Lyrical Ballads, which had been anonymously published, what he wrote was given greater prominence: ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ headed the collection and it was 195 lines longer than the next longest poem. His letter to Cottle of 28 May 1798 conveys some idea of the shared authority behind the enterprise: Wordsworth & I have maturely weigh’d your proposal, & this is our answer – W. would not object to the publishing of Peter Bell or the Salisbury Plain, singly; but to the publishing of his poems in two volumes he is decisively repugnant & oppugnant – He deems that they would want variety &c &c – if this apply in his case, it applies with tenfold force to mine. – We deem that the volumes offered to you are to a certain degree one work, in kind tho’ not in degree, as an Ode is one work – & that our different poems are as stanzas . . . (CL, I, pp. 411–412)

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Wordsworth’s interjection further on in the letter indicates that it was penned when the two poets were literally side-by-side. This parity did not last however. Place the edition of 1798 next to the one of 1800 and it becomes a self-evident fact. The second edition appears under Wordsworth’s name alone. There is a lengthy preface and a second volume of poems entirely by Wordsworth. The first poetical composition is no longer ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Mariner’, but Wordsworth’s ‘Exposition and Reply’. Where Wordsworth’s part has been greatly expanded, Coleridge’s is restricted to the five poems that he published in 1798. This was most certainly contrary to what the two men had originally agreed upon. To begin with, as Wordsworth’s letters to the printers and the publisher attest, it was Coleridge who was supposed to have contributed to the section for ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’ (WL, I, pp. 304–305). Coleridge had also expected to publish ‘Christabel’ in the space that Wordsworth filled with ‘Michael’ (see WL, I, pp. 305, 309). If they had persisted with the initial plan, Coleridge would have maintained in the 1800 Lyrical Ballads roughly the same proportion of the total poetical output that he had in 1798. In this shadow version, his two most extensive poems – ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Christabel’ – would have respectively begun and ended a collection of smaller compositions by Wordsworth. It is clear from Wordsworth’s letter of 23 May 1799 to his brother, Richard, that he saw himself as the owner of the Lyrical Ballads. Indeed, Wordsworth may have thought of the Lyrical Ballads as his as early as September 1798 when he asked Cottle to surrender the copyright to Johnson. Cottle, a provincial bookseller based in Bristol, could not of course offer the clientele of a big London publisher such as Johnson. Financial considerations were paramount to Wordsworth, who lacked a regular income and had two dependents (his sister Dorothy and a young child foisted upon him by an acquaintance). ‘I published those poems for money and money alone’ – Wordsworth stressed this pecuniary motive to Cottle on two occasions in the summer of 1799. It should be noted that the Lyrical Ballads did not start out as a financial vehicle just for Wordsworth. Coleridge had conspicuously similar designs – his letter to Cottle of 18 February 1798: Shall I add my Tragedy, & so make a second Volume . . . If you should advise a second volume, should you wish – i.e. – find it convenient – to be the purchaser? – I ask this question, because I wish you to know the true state of my circumstances – I have received nothing yet from the Wedgewoods & my money is utterly expended. (CL, I, p. 387) With the money from the Wedgwoods arriving in March, ‘an annuity for life of £150’ (CL, I, p. 374), these pecuniary worries were soon relieved. The Wedgwood brothers, heirs to one of the largest industrial fortunes in England, had decided that Coleridge was the man to invest in for the systematic production of


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genius.66 That the latter suddenly had three times the income of the Wordsworths was certainly not lost upon them – Dorothy writing from Germany to the youngest brother, Christopher: ‘Coleridge is in a very different world from what we stir in, he is all in high life, among Barons, counts and countesses . . . It would have been impossible for us to have lived as he does; we should have been ruined’ (WL, I, p. 245: 3 February 1799). She had to struggle to make ends meet, unlike Coleridge who could afford to live it up. On top of the generous allowance from the Wedgwoods, Coleridge had managed to win the ‘largest salary’ under the Morning Post; in fact, when working down in London, every expense of his was to be paid including the cost of having his family with him (EOT (CC), I, pp. lxxxvi–lxxxvii). The owner, Daniel Stuart, was eager to retain him – as Coleridge reported to Josiah Wedgwood – for making waves among the fashionable: Yet it is not unflattering to man’s Vanity to reflect that what he writes at 12 at night will before 12 hours is over have perhaps 5 or 6000 Readers! To trace a happy phrase, good image, or new argument running thro’ the Town, & sliding into all the papers! Few wine merchants can boast of creating more sensation. (CL, I, p. 569: 4 February 1800) Coleridge was sorted financially and literarily. He had a separate book of poems that was already in its second edition; he even had a separate project from their new publisher to complete: a translation of Frieidrich von Schiller’s Wallenstein (1800) for which he could expect £50. So, by the summer of 1800, when the Lyrical Ballads sold out and Longman was offering £80 for a second edition, no doubt the project would have seemed that much more important to Wordsworth. Given how much was already on Coleridge’s plate, did he really have the time to produce more poetry for yet another publication? If we add on his infamously deferential attitude towards Wordsworth at the time, the temptation to relieve Coleridge from his share of the Lyrical Ballads must have been irresistible.67 Returning to England at the end of April 1799, Wordsworth was soon laying his eggs in Coleridge’s nest.68 He fired off a series of letters to Cottle. The first, to assert his prerogative over the Lyrical Ballads; the second, of 2 June, to push out the largest offspring: ‘I should wish very much to know what number of poems have been sold, and also (as, if the edition should sell, I should probably add some others in Lieu of the Ancyent Marinere) what we are to do with the Copy Right’ (WL, I, p. 263). With the parent still away in Germany, Wordsworth tried again on 24 June: From what I can gather it seems that The Ancyent Mariner has upon the whole been an injury to the volume, I mean the old words and the strangeness of it have deterred readers from going on. If the volume should come to

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Coleridge, Revision and Romanticism a second Edition I would put in its place some little things which would be more likely to suit the common taste. (WL, I, p. 264)

Southey had derided the ‘Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ as ‘a Dutch attempt at German sublimity’ in the October 1798 Critical Review. The ‘old words’ and ‘strangeness’ are direct references to Southey’s point about its ‘obsolete words’ and the assertion that ‘[w]e do not sufficiently understand the story to analyse it’.69 Wordsworth knew that Cottle had read Southey’s review, but Cottle demurred – twice – and twice sent assurances that the Lyrical Ballads was selling well. Removing what was the flagship of ‘the volume’ was a drastic step, and without Cottle’s support, he appears to have dropped the issue when Coleridge came back. The latter was, nonetheless, only in the mood for self-abasement when dealing with Wordsworth. Thomas Poole noticed this, to no avail. Coleridge’s reply of 31 March 1800: ‘You charge me with prostration in regard to Wordsworth. Have I affirmed anything miraculous of Wordsworth? Is it impossible that a greater poet than any since Milton may appear in our days’ (CL, I, p. 584)? What made it even easier for Wordsworth to take over the project was the eventual removal of Cottle from the equation, for Coleridge’s publisher of choice since 1795 went out of business. By the middle of July, Coleridge was simply an additional avenue to instruct the printers. Three months on and Coleridge’s poems were falling out of the collection, beginning with ‘Christabel’ and then the projected contribution for the ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’. The Lyrical Ballads thus became totally Wordsworth’s, and never did he find a more willing surrogate than Coleridge: I am especially pleased that I have contributed nothing to the second volume, as I can now exert myself loudly and everywhere in their favour without suspicion of vanity or self interest. I have written Letters to all my acquaintances whose voices I think likely to have any Influence. (CL, I, p. 654 to Longman, 15 December 1800) What is striking about Wordsworth’s coup d’état is not that it happened, but that ‘The Ancient Mariner’ – the poem, which he had tried so hard to remove in June 1799 – somehow survived. Apart from Longman’s proviso that the title of the 1798 edition be retained, Wordsworth had basically a free hand over the whole enterprise. On 14 October 1800, Coleridge was still engaged in ‘the endeavor to finish Christabel . . . for the second Volume of the Lyrical Ballads’ (CL, I, p. 634) unaware that Wordsworth had already written to the printers a full week earlier to cancel the poem: It is my wish and determination that (whatever the expence may be, which I hereby take upon myself) such Pages of the Poem of Christabel as have been


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printed (if any such there be) be cancelled – I mean to have other poems substituted – a sheet of which will be sent by the next Post. (WL, I, p. 305) With Wordsworth plainly calling the shots, it was unlikely that ‘The Ancient Mariner’ could have avoided a similar fate if he had been similarly disposed to remove it. According to the ‘Note on the Ancient Mariner’, Coleridge had wanted the poem ‘suppressed’ but was persuaded by him ‘to republish it’.70 There is no reason to question Wordsworth’s veracity: he had nothing to gain from publicizing such an outright lie. No, something had caused him to change his position on ‘The Ancient Mariner’, from the persecutor who had declared to Cottle his intention ‘to put in its place some little things’, to the saviour under Longman who spotted its ‘value’. The first review that Wordsworth read on the Lyrical Ballads was Southey’s, which deeply displeased him: ‘He knew that I published those poems for money . . . If he could not conscientiously have spoken differently of the volume, he ought to have declined the task’ (WL, I, p. 267). June 1799 was when Wordsworth wanted to drop ‘The Ancient Mariner’; it was also the month in which he caught up with the reviews on the Lyrical Ballads. If he believed that periodical articles affected book sales, he would have reason enough to be unhappy with Coleridge’s poem for every reviewer up until then had panned it. Southey’s appraisal in the Critical might have induced the similarly dismissive judgements in the other Opposition journals. The Analytical described the ‘Rime of the ancyent Marinere’ in December 1798 as ‘the extravagance of a mad german poet’.71 Six months later, Charles Burney Jun. ridiculed it in the Monthly for being ‘the strangest story of a cock and a bull that we ever saw on paper’.72 However, after that summer the reception of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ suddenly turned positive. The September 1799 review in the Naval Chronicle is remarkable as much for the tone of unreserved approbation, as for a complete break with all the suggestions relating to the obscurity of the poem: it is in fact praised for its ‘quaint but simple language’.73 Lamb, regretting Southey’s treatment of the work (LL, I, p. 142), may have had a hand in effecting this change either directly or through Ralph Fell – the drinking companion who was soon to be the journal’s editor.74 The British Critic followed the lead of the Naval Chronicle in October, noting the ‘many excellencies’ of ‘The Ancyent Marinere’.75 In April 1800, it is noticed by the Anti-Jacobin as ‘an admirable “imitation, of the style as well as the spirit of the elder poets”’.76 By a strange twist of fate, it was the pro-government publications that came to favour Coleridge’s poem. Perhaps these later reviews of ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ were pivotal in shifting Wordsworth’s view of it, from ‘an injury to the volume’ under Cottle, to a poem of ‘value’ under Longman, which – as he professed in the ‘Note to the Ancient Mariner’ – impelled him ‘to republish it’. When Wordsworth informed Cottle of his desire to replace ‘The Ancyent Mariner’ with ‘little things . . . more likely to suit the common taste’ during that

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summer of 1799, he revealed the extent to which he was willing to tailor the Lyrical Ballads to the demands of the marketplace. His previous publications, An Evening Walk (1793) and Descriptive Sketches (1793), were long poems and both had bombed. What seemed in vogue were ‘little things’ – short, effusive pieces – such as William Lisle Bowles’ Fourteen Sonnets, Elegiac and Descriptive (1789), which went through seven editions by 1800.77 The premium that Wordsworth placed upon the project’s profitability is underscored by the keen interest he took in its marketing. Aside from the reception by the various literary periodicals, he badgered Cottle for details about its sale, the copyright, and, under Longman, he tried to promote it by sending presentation copies to eight public figures – ‘persons of eminence either in Letters or in the state’.78 The Lyrical Ballads, as it happened, sold. That this removed any incentive on Wordsworth’s part to alter it to any major degree is evident in the first volume of the 1800 edition, which is virtually identical in content to the original book (‘The Convict’ is the only poem which he chose not to reprint). Without firm evidence to the contrary, Wordsworth believed that Coleridge’s poems were an asset to him. He had admitted as much in the ‘Preface’: For the sake of variety and from a consciousness of my own weakness I was induced to request the assistance of a Friend, who furnished me with the Poems of the ANCIENT MARINER, the FOSTER-MOTHER’S TALE, the NIGHTINGALE, the DUNGEON, and the Poem entitled LOVE.79 There is another possibility. Wordsworth was actually asked by the publisher to keep ‘The Ancient Mariner’ because it benefited the sale of the Lyrical Ballads. I have pointed out Thomas Allsop’s claim that Coleridge was ‘told by Longmans that the greater part of the Lyrical Ballads had been sold to seafaring men, who having heard of the Ancient Mariner, concluded that it was a naval song-book’ (TT (CC), II, p. 375). If this is true, then Wordsworth must have been informed as well since he was more closely involved than Coleridge in the marketing of their book. He had wanted ‘to give’ the 1800 edition ‘the title of “Poems by W. Wordsworth”’ (WL, I, p. 297), which Longman resisted. Longman’s insistence that he retain the title would make perfect sense if the book had indeed found a niche as ‘a naval song-book’ for ‘seafaring men’. The Lyrical Ballads went through four editions before it was renamed in 1807 as Poems . . . by William Wordsworth. It is also in the 1807 collection that Wordsworth removed ‘The Ancient Mariner’, a testament perhaps to the intimate association – as Coleridge hinted two decades later – between the poem and the original title of the book. The review on ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ in the Naval Chronicle may be an indication of this niche market, especially its authentication of the contemporary resonance of the poem as a portrait of a superstitious seaman.


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Its opinion that the seafaring community had ‘a predilection for supernatural agency’ was amply justified in a decade that saw the rise of Henry Hardy and Richard Brothers – both naval officers – as prophets of doom. Brothers even had a cameo in Charles Lloyd’s Edmund Oliver,80 a novel Coleridge read in 1798. The old superstitious seaman was a stereotype and he had been put to splendid effect by William Adam, counsel for the defence, in the trial of Robert Thomas Crossfield for high treason in May 1796: Mr. James Winter, Cross-examined by Mr. Adam. Q. May I ask you what age you are? A. Fifty-nine . . . Q. You do not remember any thing of a story that used to entertain the company very much, about a hare jumping into your lap? A. No, only into my arm. Q. What was the story? A. I was coming through Uplime to Lime, in my way from Axminster, just as I got to the wall, I stopped to make water, as I was buttoning up the fall of my breeches, a hare came through my arm, I catched him by the leg and turned him round, it was about twelve o’clock at night, I threw him in over the gate in among a parcel of dogs, and he remained there that night, and the next day, just as the parson was going away to church, the hare got out . . . Q. How did you think this extraordinary hare could live so long among the dogs without being destroyed? A. If you send to Lime, if any gentleman disputes my veracity, there they will get a voucher for it. Lord Chief Justice Eyre. The gentleman asks you what you took the hare for; I suppose he means to ask you whether you took her for a witch?81 Crossfield was charged with the capital offence of ‘imagining the death of the King’ in the so-called Pop-Gun Plot: the scheme to kill George III with an airgun capable of discharging a poisoned arrow.82 James Winter, a Newfoundland seaman, was a key witness for the prosecution – in the words of the Lord Chief Justice – the ‘one witness that speaks of this instrument to be put in operation for the purpose of throwing a poisoned dart’.83 Adam’s strategy is logical enough: to discredit Winter’s testimony by undermining his reliability as a witness. By highlighting the age of the witness and by taking advantage of his

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stubborn insistence on the legitimacy of an implausible set of circumstances, Adam cast him as ‘that poor old man’ with ‘the incredible story’.84 John Gurney, documenting the proceedings, took the representation a step further. Referring to ‘the story’, he described Winter as a ‘striking instance of the complete credulity . . . of a mind which must be as near dotage as it is possible for any mind to be’.85 According to Gurney the other crewmembers ‘used to tell foolish stories, too, for the purpose of making a joke of him’.86 Adam’s strategy paid off with the defence eventually winning Crossfield’s acquittal. In the final summation of the trial, Chief Justice Eyre judged Winter to be a man with ‘a distempered imagination’ whose ‘mind is not perfectly composed’.87 The mid-1790s was when the vast currency gained by the supernatural in popular literature began to infiltrate the higher echelons of English cultural production. Mathew Gregory Lewis – the best-selling novelist of The Monk – brought his brand of gothic supernaturalism to the stage with The Castle Spectre, and once again struck gold. Lewis’ Spectre opened at the Drury Lane Theatre Royal on 14 December 1797, and when a run of three weeks would have been considered a great success the play ran for three months. ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ was Coleridge’s attempt to bring this style to poetry. It was a trend that started in Germany, and there was good evidence that the form might catch on in England: Gottfried August Bürger’s supernatural ballad Leonore had seen seven different translations into English in 1796 alone.88 The fact that three out of Wordsworth’s five longest poems in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads (‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, ‘The Thorn’ and ‘Tintern Abbey’) express some form of supernal reality shows that he too may have been affected by the topicality of the supernatural. Of course it was a contemporaneously English countryside that Wordsworth conjured up, instead of the medieval or foreign places under the German style, but then the watchword for the production had been ‘variety’ after all. Wordsworth’s changes to ‘The Thorn’ for the second edition seem to confirm his interest in gaining the maximum possible marketability for his particular mode of expression. In 1798, the poem was briefly introduced as ‘spoken in . . . the character of the loquacious narrator’; in 1800, he added a 700-plus-word endnote that portrayed the speaker as ‘a Captain of a small trading vessel . . . past the middle age of life’ and ‘prone to superstition’.89 If there was a vogue for ‘incredible stories’ by old seafarers, then plainly he did not want to be left out. The inclusion of Coleridge’s poems in the 1800 Lyrical Ballads was – as Wordsworth had hinted in the ‘Preface’ – ultimately a question of self-confidence. If he had been unencumbered by the ‘consciousness of . . . weakness’, he would have struck out on his own. Wordsworth was unsure about the marketability of his poetry, and no matter how popular gothic supernaturalism might prove to be it was simply not his cup of tea. It was this anxiety over his poetical expression that underlay the defensiveness of the ‘Preface’, and its denigration of what was a rival form:


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For a multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the encreasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupation produces a craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves. The invaluable works of our elder writers, I had almost said the works of Shakespear and Milton, are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse.90 Wordsworth’s attack on gothic supernaturalism is phrased in terms that are easily applied to ‘The Ancient Mariner’. ‘German’ and ‘extravagant’ were the exact words used by the Critical and the Analytical to deride the 1798 version. Furthermore, it is the one poem in the 1800 collection that clearly qualifies as an example of ‘literature’ conforming to ‘a craving for extraordinary incident’. These attacks on its style and structure are repeated in the ‘Note to the Ancient Mariner’: ‘The Poem of my Friend has indeed great defects; first, that the principal person has no distinct character . . . secondly, that he does not act, but is continually acted upon: thirdly, that the events having no necessary connection do not produce each other’.91 Wordsworth’s public elucidation of the ‘great defects’ in ‘the ANCIENT MARINER’ was simultaneously, a private dig at its German roots for they mirror the reservations that he had expressed two years earlier to Coleridge over the episodic construction of Leonara: ‘I do not perceive the presence of character . . . [and Bürger resorts to] incidents [which] are among the lowest allurements of poetry’ (WL, I, p. 234: NovemberDecember 1798). The kind of success achieved by works such Leonara often leads to an oversupply in the marketplace as other writers rush to get on the bandwagon. In the field of German tragedy, for instance, 62 out of the 74 works published in London during the eighteenth century were produced in the three years running up to the second Lyrical Ballads.92 From this perspective the attacks on the German manner of Coleridge’s poem, by Wordsworth and the journal reviewers, also suggest a broader backlash against the Germanization of English culture. While the supernatural had been ascendant in fiction since the mid-1790s, its acceptance in ‘high’ culture remained problematic. An overtly supernatural poem had to include a disclaimer of its connection with empirical reality. Hence, in the 1798 edition of the Lyrical Ballads, ‘The Thorn’ is a ‘story’ by a ‘loquacious narrator’ and ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere . . . [an] imitation of the style, as well as the spirit of the elder poets’.93 Any deviation from this practice – as in ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, where Wordsworth insisted the

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narrative was ‘founded on a well-authenticated fact which happened in Warwickshire’ – would elicit censure. ‘The story’ as the British Critic argued, ‘is a miracle; and modern miracles can seldom be admitted, without some degree of credulity, or a very uncommon weight of evidence’.94 It was perhaps a measure of the force of this convention that the original embellishment was not simply deleted when Coleridge modernized his ‘German’ poem for the 1800 Lyrical Ballads. Instead, another suitably admonitory notification depicting ‘THE ANCIENT MARINER’ as ‘A POET’S REVERIE’ was put in. The 1800 version of ‘The Ancient Mariner’, which resulted from the list of corrections that Coleridge communicated to the printers in July,95 was a comprehensive attempt on the part of the author to accommodate the reviewers. In fact, he was to follow every single proposal for the poem’s improvement by the British Critic: The Poem of ‘the Ancyent Marinere’ . . . has, in some places, a kind of confusion of images, which loses all effect, from not being quite intelligible. The author, who is confidently said to be Mr. Coleridge, is not correctly versed in the old language, which he undertakes to employ. ‘Noises of a swound’, p. 9, and ‘broad as a weft’, p. 11, are both nonsensical; but the ancient style is so well imitated, while the antiquated words are so very few, that the latter might with advantage be entirely removed without any detriment to the effect of the Poem . . . The beginning of the second canto, or fit, has much merit, if we except the very unwarrantable comparison of the Sun to that which no man can conceive – ‘like God’s own head’, a simile which makes a reader shudder, not with poetic feeling, but with religious disapprobation.96 The three phrases quoted from the 1798 version – ‘noises of a swound’, ‘broad as a weft’ and ‘like God’s own head’ – were replaced respectively by ‘wild and ceaseless sound’, ‘hid in mist’ and ‘like an Angel’s head’.97 The ‘antiquated words’ were ‘entirely removed’, with the medieval archaisms such as ‘ne’, ‘ee’, ‘yspread’ and ‘yeven’ returned to their modern spellings of ‘nor’, ‘eye’, ‘spread’ and ‘given’. Southey might have had the most influence over the critical reception of ‘the Ancyent Marinere’, but because the British Critic went into specific detail about how the poem should be improved it had the greater impact. Its suggestions were surely the more persuasive in being seemingly constructed out of a consensus. The periodical’s point about modernizing ‘the Ancyent Marinere’ echoed the reservations expressed by Southey and Wordsworth. Similarly, Coleridge would have no trouble discerning from ‘the very unwarrantable comparison of the Sun to . . . God’s own head’ the widely held maxim of the Fourth Commandment (Exodus, XX, verse 4): ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.’


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The offence taken by the British Critic at the ‘comparison of the Sun to . . . God’s own head’ is symptomatic of the prevailing climate of conservatism engendered by the intensification of England’s war with France. It was barely a year since Coleridge had found it necessary to publicize his allegiance to God, King and Country through the Fears pamphlet. The backlash against the Germanization of English culture can also be attributed to this context of rising nationalism. Likewise Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’ to the 1800 edition of the Lyrical Ballads, which criticized the ‘neglect’ of the national poets ‘Shakespear and Milton’. Wordsworth may have chosen to keep Coleridge’s great nautical poem, but 39 lines shorter and in a position of obscurity – coming before ‘Tintern Abbey’, which concluded the first volume – it was a ‘German’ anachronism in an English sea. The warning by the British Critic regarding the religious sensitivities of the reader was a reminder that, ideologically, Christianity was the only truly acceptable expression of supernal reality. Thus, ‘Tintern Abbey’ needed no introductory embellishment. If there was an overarching purpose to Coleridge’s revisions, it was to transform his ‘incredible’ story of 1798 into the archetypal Christian narrative of transgression, punishment and redemption. This manoeuvre is nowhere more apparent than in the new ‘Argument’: How a Ship, having first sailed to the Equator, was driven by Storms, to the cold Country towards the South Pole; how the Ancient Mariner cruelly, and in contempt of the laws of hospitality, killed a Sea-bird; and how he was followed by many and strange Judgements; and in what manner he came back to his own Country.98 There is no such moralizing in the 1798 version, which does not even mention the slaying of the albatross. Oppose this to the 1800 version, which supercharges the bird’s killing to epiphanic proportions. The most notorious breach of the ‘laws of hospitality’ in literature is of course the murder of king Duncan by his ‘kinsman’ and ‘Host’ in Macbeth. One of the most widely read and performed of Shakespeare’s plays, other borrowings by Coleridge for the poem are certainly detectable. For example, what are the trials and tribulations visited upon the Mariner but the very punishments meted out by the First Witch on the ‘master o’ th’ Tyger’? I will drain him dry as hay, Sleep shall neither night nor day, Hang upon his pent-house lide; He shall live as a man forbid; Weary sev’n nights, nine times nine, Shall he dwindle, peak and pine; Though his bark cannot be lost, Yet it shall be tempest-tost.99

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The albatross around the Mariner’s neck falls off when he learns to love the water snakes, whereupon the heavens rain down with sleep as well as water.100 Several major changes to the verse follow from this; the original sestet on page 29 has expanded in the 1800 version to two separate stanzas of four and five lines,101 and everything formerly on pages 31 and 40 – running onto the first stanza on page 41 – are deleted. These revisions are connected to the spirit crew. The Mariner’s fear of them102 is replaced in the 1800 version with the conviction that they are ‘not souls, that fled in pain, / Which to their corses came again, / But a troop of Spirits blest’.103 In the 1798 poem, page 31 contains verses employing such medievalist beliefs as the enchanter’s eye and the charm of invisibility to the Undead. The spirit crew’s malevolent cast on pages 40 and 41 amply justifies the terror that they inspire in the Mariner. Bereft of these the poem’s gothic supernaturalism is reduced, its once frightening ‘shadows’ of men effectively rewritten into a benevolent force to conform to the schema of the Mariner’s final redemption.

2.3 ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1817) ‘Everyone’ – as McGann observes in 1985 – ‘knows that the “Rime” underwent a series of major textual alterations between 1798, when it first appeared in Lyrical Ballads, and 1817, when Coleridge all but completed his revisions in the Sybilline Leaves collection of his verse’.104 Nevertheless, when examining literary works that have been repeatedly revised, it is still generally a case of business as usual. Keane’s Coleridge’s Submerged Politics (1994) is typical in treating the poem as a single-text artefact. Even when discussing an ostensibly 1790s context, his quotations are overwhelmingly taken from the version ‘Coleridge all but completed’ in 1817. He only deviates from this practice when the more contemporaneous text differs too markedly for the final version to stand in its place. There is no doubt Keane ‘knows that the “Rime” underwent a series of textual alterations’, but with respect to textual multiplicity his response is characteristic of mainstream literary practice: to work around it whenever and wherever possible. There are at least two reasons why a literary critic might adopt this strategy. The first is primarily economic. Given the rarefied and fragmentary nature of literary studies, it is logical to consolidate the limited audience that is out there by standardizing the little which is held in common. In the case of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, this has led to the use of the best-known and most widely available text: the final version. The second is coherence. Given the difficulties of creating a compelling narrative out of the wide array of literary and historical materials created by literary writers and their critics, is it really necessary to take into account the circumstance that each and every one of these items may have multiple versions? The answer, in short, is yes. For what is


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practised makes an impact on the socio-economic fabric that determines what is in fact practicable. Consider: when a literary work exists in one widely available form, does it not become the only composition in the mind of its readers? Similarly is the practice of treating poems as single texts the result of standardization, or standardization the result of the practice of treating poems as single texts? The self-perpetuating process of treating a literary work as a single-text artefact is a special challenge to current literary studies. With the ascendancy of historically orientated criticism, it is no longer sufficient to extrapolate from our own experience of a poem, we want to understand as well how it might be read in other times and places. Ignoring the fact of multiple versions undermines this goal because it could place the scholar in the untenable situation of not only having a different work in mind from that of his historical subject, but also from that of his readers for whom yet another version could be predominant. To subscribe to the fiction of an ideal or authoritative version is, ultimately, to risk a radical disconnect between text and context. For the purpose of illustration, I will quote again the following words that Henry Nelson Coleridge recorded from his uncle in 1830: MRS. BARBAULD once told me that she admired the Ancient Mariner very much, but that there were two faults in it, – it was improbable, and had no moral. As for the probability, I owned that that might admit some question; but as to the want of a moral, I told her that in my own judgement the poem had too much; and that the only, or chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a work of such pure imagination. (TT (CC), II, p. 100) Literary critics have worried for half a century over what Coleridge meant by ‘the Ancient Mariner’ having ‘too much’ in the way ‘of a moral’. The generation that had experienced the Second World War was understandably concerned with what he seemed to be saying about morality in art. Humphrey House asserts that Coleridge, talking in 1830, could not possibly have meant to exclude all moral relevance from the working of the ‘pure imagination’ when his whole developed critical theory stressed again and again the union of heart and head, the special power of the poet to bring ‘the whole soul of man into activity’. Coleridge was really taking issue with the overt didacticism of the poem – according to House – particularly with the ‘epigram towards the end’.105 But if Coleridge had been truly unhappy with it, couldn’t he have simply removed it? Indeed, there is no evidence he had even tried to amend it: the ‘epigram towards the end’ remained unchanged throughout his lifetime.

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Studying the differing responses of Robinson Crusoe and ‘The Ancient Mariner’ to slavery, Keane is clearly as heavily invested as House in Coleridge’s moral position. While many contemporary readers ‘will tend to agree with House’, coming from a less Christian age they will also be – in Keane’s words – ‘put off . . . by the systematic moralizing imposed on the poem by the Mariner in dialogue with the Wedding-Guest and, especially, by Coleridge as the later theologian-glossist’.106 By noting didacticisms throughout the poem, Keane actually strengthens House’s interpretation because it can now be further argued that the didacticisms may have simply been too pervasive for Coleridge to remove. Nevertheless, if the moral sentiments were as pervasive as Keane evidently believes, how do we explain Anna Letitia Barbauld having thought that ‘the Ancient Mariner . . . had no moral’? To begin to make sense of Coleridge’s remark we must first understand where he is coming from. He might have been ‘talking in 1830’, but he was quoting from a conversation that he had with Anna Letitia Barbauld. When did this conversation take place? Not in 1830, for by then, Barbauld had already been dead five years. Bearing in mind Barbauld’s firm Unitarian convictions, and Coleridge’s break with the movement and subsequent slide into the so-called Church and King party – by most critical accounts, from 1798 to 1800, or by own estimate, from 1804 to 1806 or 1807 – I would suggest that the conversation he had with her was at least two decades old when he recapitulated it for Henry Nelson Coleridge. If so, could the words that Coleridge recalled in 1830 have been – contrary to House’s supposition – ‘meant to exclude all moral relevance’ precisely because he had yet to develop into the moralizing persona who ‘stressed again and again the union of heart and head, the special power of the poet to bring “the whole soul of man into activity”’? If so, then not only has House misunderstood the context, Keane has also obfuscated the very poem that Coleridge and Barbauld were discussing: the work by ‘the later theologianglossist’ (which was published in 1817) could not have been the one that they had in mind. In the interest of historical specificity, each text should be matched with the context that it is chronologically the closest to. Within the time frame of the conversation, that is, from 1798 to 1807 (at the very latest), two major versions exist. Having placed Coleridge and Barbauld, the next thing to do is to try and ascertain the most relevant version. We know that he had sent her a presentation copy of Poems, on Various Subjects (1796); perhaps he also sent her a copy of the ‘Rime’? In this case, he would have sent her the 1798 version when the Lyrical Ballads was still his property. So, was the 1798 version then the poem under discussion? For Barbauld perhaps, unfortunately, from Coleridge’s standpoint the question remains an open one. I have shown how his revisions for the 1800 version had increased the moral tone of the poem. Perhaps it was the second, more ‘moral’ version that he was referring to during his conversation with her? In other words, at the heart of the disagreement between them over the moral quotient of ‘the Ancient Mariner’ might well have been


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a misunderstanding caused by them having fundamentally different Mariners in mind. It is only in recent times that the approach of treating poems as single-text artefacts has come under scrutiny, so there is no possibility that Coleridge and Barbauld would have been able to recognize their mistake. If Coleridge was truly bothered by ‘the obtrusion of the moral sentiment’ in the 1800 version, as I am suggesting, then, for maximum logical coherence, I should demonstrate some attempt on his part to reduce the didacticism of the poem. In point of fact, he removed for ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1817) the moralizing ‘Argument’ that he had introduced in ‘The Ancient Mariner, a Poet’s Reverie’ (1800). On that note, the version that ‘Coleridge all but completed’ in 1817 shall now be turned to and the underlying causes of this and other changes examined. ∗∗∗ On 8 March 1815, a public meeting was held at the marketplace in Calne. The purpose was to petition against Frederick Robinson’s bill, which sought to prohibit the importation of wheat below the price of 80 shillings per quarter. After drawing up the appeal for one ‘Mr. Wait’, according to Coleridge, he ‘mounted on the Butcher’s Table [and] made a butcherly sort of Speech of an hour long to a very ragged but not butcherly audience’ (CL, IV, p. 549). It was widely feared that the passing of this new bill would bring starvation to the common man: its reading before the House of Commons on 6 March was greeted by three consecutive days of rioting in London.107 Despite the vast number of petitions dispatched to Parliament, every attempt to stall or to amend it – by lowering the base rate of importation, for example – was negated by large majorities. The bill became law on 20 March, much to Coleridge’s disgust: Merciful God! what aweful Times . . . I feel a strong Impulse to write & publish a dithyrambic Ode, a Tocsin of Repentence, with the Title . . . ‘AND HAVE WE NOT DESERVED IT?’ The Question concerning the necessity of a Reform in Parliament I consider as now decided – the Land-owners & the great Farmers are our Masters, and have dared to establish a minimum wage on the price, a maximum on the quantity, of the Poor Man’s cold dry Dinner. (CL, IV, p. 555: 21 March 1815) There is nothing like war to consolidate public opinion. As the European conflict wound to its close, public interest turned inward and – in the words of the ‘Preface’ to the Annual Register . . . for the Year 1815 – ‘concentrated upon private and personal distress’.108 England was in an economic depression. Domestically and internationally, demand was weak as governments were forced to cut back spending in order to pay off debts from two decades of fighting.

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The clamour for reform, which had been so effectually muted by the war with France, rose again louder than ever. To forestall the dissemination of reformist ideas among the lower orders stamp duties were increased in 1815, raising the price of newspapers to seven pence a copy. Prosecutions for seditious and blasphemous libel were also stepped up, and in 1817 the government suspended Habeas Corpus. It was as if the 1790s had returned, with Coleridge once again railing at the Tory establishment. A remarkable occurrence considering that he had been for over a decade in the service of the Courier, a ministerial newspaper. The year 1815 saw no famine however. So plentiful in fact was the harvest that the price of grain fell, dashing whatever hopes the landed interest had of increasing their earnings through the new legislation. ‘The public mind’ – the Annual Register recorded – ‘was pacified’, but the sentiments that the Corn Law had stirred up in Coleridge proved to be more enduring. Though ‘AND HAVE WE NOT DESERVED IT’ does not appear to have been written, Coleridge did go on to write the seminal Biographia Literaria and to collect a new edition of his poetry: Sibylline Leaves. Delays over printing, an unfortunate spat with the supervisor John Gutch, and a misunderstanding with John Murray whom Coleridge had initially wanted to be the publisher, resulted in a two-year delay before his books were published in July 1817.109 In the interim, Christabel – the poem that he had written for the 1800 Lyrical Ballads – was finally released as an octavo pamphlet. The new superstar of English versification, Lord Byron, referred to it in The Siege of Corinth (1816) as ‘that wild and singularly original and beautiful poem’.110 Ten of the sixteen reviews that Christabel received were alerted by Byron’s recommendation, and since it ran through three editions under Murray no less than 4,500 copies of the work must have been sold.111 Another new development was Wordsworth’s decision in 1815 to relinquish the ‘beautiful Poems of Mr. Coleridge’.112 One of these was ‘The Ancient Mariner’, which the author promptly reclaimed as the lead of his own Sibylline Leaves. If the taste of political activism at Calne had not been quite enough to re-ignite Coleridge’s fiery enthusiasm of the 1790s, it did at least compel him to reprint the anti-war and anti-Pitt ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’. The poem had been published nearly 20 years before in the Morning Post,113 but Sibylline Leaves was where Coleridge first admitted his authorship. In Biographia Literaria, which was envisaged as a companion volume to the poetical collection, he gave this rousing testimony to the radicalism of his youth: O! never can I remember those days with either shame or regret. For I was most sincere, most disinterested! My opinions were indeed in many and most important points erroneous; but my heart was single. Wealth, rank, life itself then seemed cheap to me, compared with the interests of (what I believed to be) the truth, and the will of my maker. I cannot even accuse myself of having been actuated by vanity; for in the expansion of my enthusiasm I did not think of myself at all. (BL (CC), I, p. 180)


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Calne is just 20 miles east of Bristol – the city in which he had first made his mark. It might have been common knowledge that Coleridge was a radical in his youth, but he was also saying in an increasingly oppressive climate that he was proud of it. Nevertheless, it was an exposé that evidently caused him considerable anxiety. On 2 July 1816, he described ‘the third Volume entitled Sibylline Leaves’ to John Hookham Frere as ‘a collection of such poems as I dare[d] consent to be known as of my own Will as well as Authorship’ (CL, IV, p. 646). The direct result of this seems to be that disingenuous, oscillatory behaviour for which he has become so notorious. So, in Biographia Literaria, he revealed his radicalism only to deflect it to a sentimentalized past where it could be conveniently put down as being ‘in many and most important points erroneous’. ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’ curses William Pitt with the fate of being torn ‘limb from limb’, however, in Sibylline Leaves, the six pages that the poem takes up follow a 20-page apology in which ‘if . . . Mr. Pitt’s person been in hazard’ – he claimed he would – ‘interpose my own body, and defend his life at the risque [sic] of my own’.114 If there was any logic underlying the structure of Biographia Literaria and Sibylline Leaves, it was to assert a fundamentally unworldly nature to mitigate the fallout from his return to radical politics in the politically charged atmosphere of post-Napoleonic England. The operation of such a tactic would explain the prominence that was accorded to ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ in Sibylline Leaves. Christabel, with its interest in witchcraft, sexual demonology and states of consciousness, would have already had some effect in distancing him from the practical matters of everyday life. In contrast, his collection of political verses (‘Poems occasioned by Political Events’) is decidedly small and low key. In a collection that purports in the ‘Preface’ to contain ‘the whole of the author’s poetical compositions’, including the ‘Poems published . . . in various obscure or perishable journals’,115 where is the celebrated political satire that he contributed to the Morning Post in 1799: ‘The Devil’s Walk’? Similarly, where are his celebratory sonnets on the heroes of revolution – Erskine, La Fayette, Koskiusko, Godwin and Stanhope – that he published in the Morning Chronicle in 1794 and 1795?116 Not only is the political section of Sibylline Leaves patently incomplete, it is divided and diluted by the 22 pages of prose used to introduce ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’. When ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ was published in the Lyrical Ballads of 1798, it was lashed in the reviews for being ‘German’ and ‘unintelligible’: the familiar labels used to dismiss the genre of gothic supernaturalism. Coleridge responded in 1800 by reducing the medieval elements and Christianizing the narrative, but in the absence of any subsequent commentary he really did not know whether the poem had been successfully improved. This question was by Sibylline Leaves an especially urgent one, for a detectably German influence remained as unacceptable in high culture as Jacobinism was in politics. Coleridge had complained in August 1816 about ‘the cloud of Ignorance & Prejudice which [continued] to a disgraceful and even inhospitable and

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ungrateful excess [to over gloom] the mind of the learned Public with regard to German Literature’ (CL, IV, p. 664). The word ‘German’ applied to an Englishman or his works was practically a prologue to abuse in the literary periodicals of the day. What was worse was that Coleridge actually had a reputation for obscurity, as he lamented to Byron: ‘No one of my bitterest Censors have ever charged my writings with triviality; but on the contrary, they have been described as over elaborate, obscure, paradoxical, over subtle’ (CL, IV, p. 604). The most significant change to the poem for Sibylline Leaves is the vast increase in the prose commentary from 58 words to over 1,000. According to the London Magazine of July 1820, ‘aware of its general obscurity, [Coleridge] has . . . resorted to [the] very praise-worthy expedient . . . of prefixing marginal annotations, to buoy us, like life-boats’.117 These ‘marginal annotations’, as the Academic pointed out in the following year, serve ‘to explain the incidents and fill up the vacancies of the poem’ – the periodical suggested he should have done the same for Christabel.118 Coleridge might have brought gothic supernaturalism to English poetry, but it was Walter Scott who created the successful formula: The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1806) sold ‘nearly thirty thousand copies’ – and as Francis Jeffrey indicated in the Edinburgh Review ‘the demand for Marmion, and the poem now before us, has been still more considerable, – a circulation . . . altogether without example, in the case of a bulky work, not addressed to the bigotry of the mere mob’.119 The ‘poem now before us’ was The Lady of the Lake (1810); for someone who kept in touch with literary trends by reading the Edinburgh and Quarterly reviews (see CL, III, p. 543), the fact that Scott’s brand of gothic supernaturalism had only once been charged with being ‘German’ was most instructive.120 Coleridge had planned in March 1815 to write ‘a Particular Preface to the Ancient Mariner and the Ballads, on the employment of the Supernatural in Poetry and the Laws which regulate it – in answer to a note of Sir W. Scott’s in the Lady of the Lake’ (CL, IV, p. 561). This ‘note’ is undoubtedly that of ‘Canto Third’, ‘St. V.’ in The Lay of the Last Minstrel, which lays out Scott’s opinion on the topic: [He] may differ from modern critics, in supposing that the records of human superstition, if peculiar to, and characteristic of, the country in which the same is laid, are a legitimate subject of poetry. He gives, however, a ready assent to the narrower proposition, which condemns all attempts of an irregular or disordered fancy to excite terror, by accumulating a train of fantastic and incoherent horrors, whether borrowed from all countries, and patched upon a narrative belonging to one which knew them not, or derived from the author’s own imagination.121 The copious endnotes to Scott’s verses have more than an explanatory function. Replete with references to numerous antiquarian sources, with authorial


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interjections offering contemporary, even local detail, they contextualize the supernatural in an ostensibly Scottish landscape. In the annotation to ‘The viewless forms of air – St. XII. P. 24’ for instance, an old Scottish manuscript is used to highlight the belief of the ‘Scottish vulgar . . . in an intermediate class of [airborne] spirits . . . to whose agency they ascribe floods, storms and all such phenomena’.122 It is essentially through Scott’s tactic that the supernatural in ‘The Ancient Mariner’ is eventually detached from German culture, except that Coleridge’s authorities are sourced from the rarefied heights of classical scholarship. Thus, to substantiate the existence of ‘invisible inhabitants’ on ‘this planet’ the prose commentary alludes to the writings of ‘the learned Jew, Josephus’ – an eminent historian – ‘and the Platonic Constantinopolitan, Michael Psellus’, the man responsible for the renewal of Byzantine classical learning that later influenced the Italian Renaissance. ‘I can easily believe that there are more Invisible than Visible Beings in the Universe’, begins the Latin epigraph at the start of the poem, ‘but who will declare to us the Family of all these, and acquaint us with the Agreements, Differences, and peculiar Talents which are to be found among them’ (PW (CC), I, p. 371)? There are differences of course. The ‘annotations’ to ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ are a lot briefer, which was a definite improvement in the light of how Francis Jeffrey – one of Coleridge’s most persistent critics – repeatedly took issue with the length of Scott’s notes. Jeffrey had advised in the April 1805 Edinburgh Review ‘a smaller edition’ of The Lay of the Last Minstrel ‘with an abridgement of the notes, for the use of mere lovers of poetry’.123 In 1815, five ballad romances on and detecting little change, we have this final sentence by the Edinburgh Review on The Lord of the Isles: ‘The notes are too long – and the volume a great deal too expensive’.124 Coleridge’s ‘annotations’ in accompanying rather than being appended to the verse also precludes the obvious shortcoming of detailed endnotes, that of ‘put[ting] the reader to a necessity, when his mind is engaged . . . of turning the leaves backwards and forwards, in the dry pursuit of the connecting incidents, and in tracing an outline of facts amidst a crowd of descriptions, and transactions’.125 The idea of ‘prefixing marginal annotations’ to ‘the Ancient Mariner’ could have come from the contemporary academic practice of glossing lengthy or difficult passages with summarizing marginalia: the poem – as the Literary Gazette pronounced in the year of its publication – is ‘whimsically indexed on the margin, like a history’.126 Or, it could have come from Robert Bloomfield’s method of prefixing each page of The Farmer’s Boy (1800) with an explanatory header. Bloomfield’s verses on rural life had ‘pleased’ Coleridge ‘very much’, and in selling an estimated 26,000 copies within three years the work fired fantasies of how he too might achieve similar success. His trump card then was ‘Christabel’, a gothic supernatural poem ‘the size of the Farmer’s Boy’ (CL, II, p. 716). Under the second possibility, Coleridge’s March 1815 aspiration to write a ‘Preface to the Ancient Mariner’ to answer Sir Walter Scott stretches back a further 14 years: from a March 1801 wish to complement this fantasy

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‘Christabel’ with ‘two Discourses, Concerning Metre, & Concerning the Marvellous in Poetry’ in response to Mr. Robert Bloomfield. The overall effect of Coleridge’s revisions is an increased anthropomorphism to the poem. What had been in the earlier versions simply a flowery description of the north wind as ‘a Tempest strong’ driving the Mariner’s ship ‘Southward . . . Like Chaff’ is dramatized into a desperate flight from a bona fide dragon of a storm: And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he Was tyrannous and strong: He struck with his o’ertaking wings, And chased us south along. With sloping masts and dipping prow, As who pursued with yell and blow Still treads the shadow of his foe And forward bends his head, The ship drove fast, loud roar’d the blast, And southward aye we fled.127 There is a corresponding increase in the number of personal pronouns used for things, a process in which the ‘marginal annotations’ not only participate but considerably advance as well. Though the two stanzas personifying the moon in book 4 are largely unchanged since 1800, there is no denying the new dimension that Coleridge has added with the prose accompaniment on her train of ‘stars’ – ‘[they] that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and [to whom] everywhere the blue sky belongs . . . and is their appointed rest, and their native country, and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected . . . [with] joy’.128 This descriptive method of extending personality to things, combined with the erasure of their empirical quantities – for example, in the 1817 version the wind has none of the original directional (‘North’) and chronological (‘days and weeks’) indicatives – to stress generalized qualities, may be seen as yet another component of Coleridge’s strategy to obfuscate his political quotient. According to the ‘Apologetic Preface’ to ‘Fire, Famine, Slaughter’, its ‘generalized’ and ‘abstract’ personifications prove that it has no connection with ‘flesh and blood’ realities.129 Indeed its extreme vehemence precludes it from ever having any influence on the actions of men, since ‘prospects of pain and evil to others, and . . . all deep feelings of revenge, are commonly expressed in a few words, ironically tame, and mild’.130 There is no poem in Sibylline Leaves with as many of the ‘vivid and . . . fantastic forms’ that Coleridge has pointed out in ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’ as ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. The fact that the latter preceded the section for his political poems surely worked towards their anaesthetization, by foregrounding the intrinsic excessiveness of his style.


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2.4 Postscript It was in July 1811, when Coleridge’s article criticizing the reappointment of the Duke of York to the command of the army was forcibly suppressed that he found out the true extent of his obligations to the government under the Courier (EOT (CC), I, pp. cl–cli). Back then, having failed to transfer himself to The Times, he chose to swallow his pride and continue with Thomas Street’s newspaper. During the post-Napoleonic years, however, we find him trying to return to ‘the paper [in which his] first poetic efforts were brought before the public’ (CL, IV, p. 815: to James Perry, 25 January 1818): the avowedly oppositional Morning Chronicle. When he failed again, this time he chose to resign. The passing of the Corn Law seemed to have radicalized him; indeed, his final journalistic effort of March 1818 – ‘Children in the Cotton Factories’ (EOT (CC), II, pp. 483–489) – was entirely reformist in sentiment. The evidence for Coleridge’s political realignment intermittently bubbles to the surface, in such public displays as the uncharacteristically sympathetic article in the Courier of 18 April 1816 on Byron’s divorce (EOT (CC), II, pp. 427–429). In July, an essay defending England’s participation in the European war suddenly ends by execrating the newspaper as a publication of ‘Vulgar prejudice’ and himself as an ‘illliberal [sic] . . . intolerant scribbler’ (EOT (CC), II, p. 434)! These discrepancies are observable in Biographia Literaria and Sibylline Leaves. To return to the testimony of his youthful radicalism: if he had been ‘most sincere, most disinterested’ – if ‘[w]ealth, rank, life itself then seemed cheap . . . compared with the interests of . . . the truth’ – what did it imply about his position with a newspaper that was widely suspected to be in the pay of the Treasury? Coleridge using Claudius’ apology to Hadrian in the ‘Preface’ to ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’ to excuse the poem as an error of his youth was equally problematic, for the Classical poet was understood to be insincere131 – this was Edward Gibbon’s interpretation in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: ‘He deplores, in mournful strains, the fatal indiscretion into which he had been hurried by passion and folly . . . Yet, in some places, an air of irony and indignation betrays his secret reluctance’.132 There was the same kind of defiance in Coleridge, whose revisions for the 1817 version actually resulted in an enhanced gothic atmosphere. The new nine-line stanza on the fall of night after the departure of the ‘spectre-bark’ is a case in point.133 In 1800, Coleridge had changed his depiction of the sun from being like ‘God’s own head’ to ‘an Angel’s head’ because the British Critic had been offended by the impiety of the expression. In 1817, despite sensing a ‘righteous’ tone in ‘the taste and Principles of the . . . English public’ (CL, IV, p. 562), he restored the phrase. The return of ‘God’s own head’ was noticed by the Monthly Review in January 1819, which professed to ‘discover’ in the reprinting of the line ‘a methodistical sort of freedom about him’ – ‘A freedom with the Unutterable Name’.134 Given the close association between Methodism and political radicalism, that would of course be Jacobinism.

Chapter 3

Ungodly Visions

3.1 An Allegoric Vision from a ‘Damn’d Jacobine’ (1795) The insistence upon an idealized mode of pastoral living to correct a deprecated urban one is a familiar trope in English Romantic expression. As Coleridge reiterated to a correspondent in March 1795, ‘we . . . become . . . the best possible [in] the country [when] all around us smile Good and Beauty’ (CL, I, p. 154). His morally edifying rusticity is really only a step away from Joshua Reynolds’s own conception in The Holy Family, a painting completed in 1788, in which the ‘rural beauties’ are no less than the revered icons of Christianity (see Figure 3.1). John the Baptist is easily decipherable in the infant boy with the camel hair garment and the makeshift staff. The child looking on has to be Jesus, who is typically in mother Mary’s arms, leaving Joseph – Jesus’s earthly father – as the man dozing off behind them. We will come back again to The Holy Family, it being more relevant at this point to consider the ideological parameters of Coleridge’s rural idyll: I care not, Fortune! what you me deny – You cannot rob me of free Nature’s Grace! You cannot shut the Windows of the Sky, Through which the Morning shews her dewy face – You cannot bar my constant feet to rove Through Wood and Vale by living Stream at Eve (CL, I, pp. 154–155) Coleridge acknowledging these lines to be James Thomson’s (from ‘the Castle of Indolence’) is not quite accurate, for it elides the rather significant changes that he made to the original. The last three lines of the same section in Thomson actually read: ‘Through which Aurora shews her brightening Face / You cannot bar my constant Feet to trace / The Woods and Lawns, by living Stream, at Eve’.1 This environment where individuals have the right to roam (which the revision of Thomson from ‘trace’ to ‘rove’ further emphasizes) is far removed from the contemporary realities of an English landscape, as both poets featured a countryside that is ‘free’ essentially from the divisions and barriers of ownership. But where Thomson’s was located in the imaginary

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Figure 3.1 The Holy Family, 1800 (engraving) by William Sharp after the painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved (5.i.2–9).

past of some nameless foreign land, Coleridge based his on a distinctly localized anti-Capitalist feeling: ‘I would that we could form a Pantisocracy in England, and that you could be one of us’ (CL, I, p. 155). Coleridge’s Pantisocracy postulated a society in which the adult members share property, labour and government. It was an idea that owed much to the urge among Quakers and Unitarians – the so-called ‘friends of liberty’ – to leave the country and settle in small, idealistic communes in the wilds of America. As of 1 February 1793, England was at war with France, and as Robert Hall’s An Apology for the Freedom of the Press (1793) highlights, they were a persecuted people: OF that foul torrent of insult and abuse, which it has lately been the lot of the friends of liberty to sustain, a larger portion hath fallen to the share of Dissenters than any other description of men . . . The effusions of a distempered loyalty, are mingled with execrations on that unfortunate sect; as if the attachment to the king were to be measured by an hatred to the Dissenters.

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Coleridge, Revision and Romanticism Without any shadow of criminality, they are doomed to perpetual insult and reproach; their repose disturbed, and their lives threatened and endangered.2

The religious dissenters were perceived as a threat to society because of the welcome they had given to the French revolution in the early 1790s.3 Particularly obnoxious to Tory loyalists were the Unitarians who seemed to be at the forefront of nearly every political struggle for social change. It was a provocation that led to mob violence: An Apology for the Freedom of the Press recorded ‘three riots in England of late on a political account, one at Birmingham, one at Manchester, and one at Cambridge; each of which have been levelled against dissenters and friends of reform’.4 The climax came in 1795, when the Unitarians declared in favour of peace. Coleridge himself was to throw down the gauntlet in Bristol with a lecture on the incalculable ‘Evil of . . . the PRESENT WAR’ (Lects 1795 (CC), p. 54), which daringly blamed these storms of popular hatred on the Anglican clergy. As he put it, they were ‘sable-vested Instigators of the Birmingham riots’ that destroyed Joseph Priestley’s house and laboratory (Lects 1795 (CC), p. 38). If anything the disastrously poor harvest of 1794 indicated that the rioting could only worsen in 1795: Coleridge agreed with Southey to embark for America by April. This would have been exactly a year after Priestley’s own departure,5 and like the man whom he upheld as the leading light of the Unitarians he too had his run-in with ‘Mobs and Mayors, Blockheads and Brickbats, Placards and Press gangs’ (CL, I, p. 152). In fact, he ‘was soon obliged by the persecutions of Darkness to discontinue’ the Bristol lectures (CL, I, p. 155). Was Coleridge here referring to the same organization of ‘sable-vested’ men that he held to be responsible for the violence against Priestley? The latter had sounded a veritable war cry against the Anglican clergy, ‘with respect to the Church’ – Priestley once proclaimed: ‘I have long since drawn the sword and thrown away the scabbard’.6 April 1795 came with food riots in Coventry, Nottingham and Oxford;7 still nowhere near the £2,000 he needed to found his Pantisocracy, Coleridge decided to teach a course ‘on Revealed Religion its’ Corruptions and Political Views’. The first lecture, delivered in May at the Assembly Coffeehouse on the Quay, he opened with a story about ‘men in black robes’ cultivating a diabolical ‘Temple of Superstition’ (Lects 1795 (CC), pp. 90–91). Coleridge’s ‘allegoric vision’ of 1795 should be read as an extended attack on the Established Church, then the bête noire of the Unitarian movement. This was his experience of the inner sanctum: Around its walls I observed a number of phosphoric Inscriptions – each one of the words separately I seemed to understand but when I read them in sentences they were riddles incomprehensible and contradictory. Read and believe said my Guide – These are mysteries. In the middle of the Hall the

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Goddess was placed – her features blended with darkness rose to my view terrible yet vacant. (Lects 1795 (CC), p. 90) It was in his fifth lecture that he spelt out the ‘mysteries’ at the heart of Anglicanism. The ‘Doctrine of Atonement’ he denounced as ‘the most irrational and gloomy Superstition that ever degraded the human mind’ (Lects 1795 (CC), p. 204). For we must be truly malevolent to require the sacrifice of our own child, and even if God were so – in Coleridge’s words – ‘how is it consistent with this dreadful Equity, this Tartarean Justice, that the sufferings of one Being for a few hours should prove an adequate Satisfaction for the Sins of the whole World’ (Lects 1795 (CC), p. 205)? The ‘idolatrous doctrine of the Trinity’ was dealt with next, which was traced to Plato (Lects 1795 (CC), pp. 207–209). Coleridge believed the borrowing of ancient Greek ideas to be endemic to Anglicanism; in the lecture he also deplored how ‘the Poor Man’ listening ‘to some lily-handed Sermonizer’ received ‘Seneca and Tully in lieu of Christ and St Paul’, and ‘schoolboy scraps stolen from the vain babbling of Pagan philosophy for the pure precepts of revealed Wisdom’ (Lects 1795 (CC), p. 209). What ‘the Poor Man’ needed were plain and practical sermons, instead of the displays of classical scholarship that he would not have had the education to comprehend. Accordingly, in the ‘allegoric vision’, the Anglican ‘Religion’ resides in darkness ‘where not even a Lamp glimmered’ and the pilgrim is left ‘wond’ring and dissatisfied’ (Lects 1795 (CC), pp. 90–91). The Unitarians were excluded from civil office under the Test and Corporation Acts because they did not subscribe to the Trinitarian concept of God. Coleridge’s thinking was typical of the movement: his objections to the tri-unity of God and to the doctrine of vicarious atonement were learnt from Priestley.8 To reflect the Unitarian belief in the mere humanity of Christ, ‘Religion’ in Coleridge’s allegory is but ‘a Woman’. Unlike the cold, unfeeling stone ‘Goddess’ of the ‘men in Black Robes’ – to use The Holy Family (see Figure 3.1) – the truth of Unitarianism is the simplicity and warmth of a mother Mary. While the former is kept in a building depicted in the terms of a gothic cathedral, the latter is encountered in the rural outdoors. Indeed, Coleridge’s ‘Valley of Life’ would easily serve as a description for the landscape in Reynolds’s painting: IT was towards Morning when the Brain begins to reassume its waking state . . . that I found myself in a vast Plain . . . It possessed a great diversity of soils and here was a sunny spot and there a dark one just such a mixture of sunshine and shade as we may have observed on the Hills in an April Day when the thin broken Clouds are scattered over the heavens. (Lects 1795 (CC), pp. 89–90) The ‘optic Glass’ of ‘Religion’ offers those who follow her a means of transcending the constraints of the valley. Those who leave her, however, simply find

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Figure 3.2 Prince Hal and Poins Surprise Falstaff with Doll Tearsheet, 1805 (engraving) by William Bromley after the painting by Henri Fuseli. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved (80.f.8–17).

themselves heading for another dark enclosure. It is ‘a Vast and dusky Cave’; at the mouth are ‘Sensuality’ and ‘Blasphemy’; deep inside, where it is ‘unnaturally cold’, there is ‘an old dim eyed Man’ playing with a microscope (Lects 1795 (CC), pp. 91–92). Their relationship to each other is inferable from the second lecture, which portrays ‘Atheism’ as the ideological offspring of ‘that state of mind in which men expect the blessings of Life . . . from Jupiter the lustful Leader of the mythologic Banditti . . . and Venus a harlot’ (Lects 1795 (CC), p. 143). The unholy family of the cavern are, variously, emblems of infidelity. ‘Blasphemy’ who ‘uttered big words, yet ever . . . turned pale at his own courage’ has resonances of Shakespeare’s Falstaff, the coward whose boasts reach blasphemous proportions. Falstaff, probably the most illustrated fictional character of the 1790s, was usually depicted with one or two coquettish women. Coleridge’s arrangement of ‘Sensuality’ with ‘Blasphemy’ is strongly suggestive of Henry Fuseli’s painting Prince Hal and Poins Surprise Falstaff with Doll Tearsheet

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(see Figure 3.2), which was on exhibition at John and Josiah Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery. Though the original work is lost, we can deduce from Fuseli’s other depictions of lewd and licentious women that she would have been elaborately attired. To oppose this interpretation of ‘Sensuality’ to ‘Religion’ (‘clad in white garments of simplest texture’) is to perceive her as an emblem for the Nonconformist critique on the Church of England as the Whore of Babylon. It was an image that appealed to Coleridge, who alluded to it on numerous occasions. In Conciones Ad Populum (1795), for example, there is a letter from ‘Liberty’ depicting the ‘RELIGION’ of ‘Great Britain’ to be ‘a painted patched-up old Harlot . . . arrayed in purple and scarlet colour . . . gold and precious stones and pearls’ with ‘MYSTERY’ written ‘upon her Forehead’ (Lects 1795 (CC), p. 30). As for the old man with the microscope, it is undoubtedly James Beattie’s figure of the sceptic in The Minstrel who is being referred to – Coleridge was to employ the following passage in his third lecture: Their Bosoms narrow as they grow in years, No sense have they of Love, no strength to soar, On Hope’s broad wing above this Vale of Fears – The dark cold-hearted Sceptics creeping pore Through microscope of Metaphysic Lore; And much they grope for Truth but never hit Their heavy powers, inadequate before. Their earthy Lusts make more and more unfit Yet deem they Darkness Light, and their vain Blunders Wit. (Lects 1795 (CC), pp. 158–159)9 In contrast with the Jesus of Reynolds, who was wrapped in light and love, Coleridge’s emblem for Atheism was a picture of complete abandonment: alone, in the dark, eking out an existence in an ultimately meaningless universe. Cave meets temple because ‘Atheism’ and ‘Superstition’ are the two demonic faces of the one Established Church. Coleridge’s ‘allegoric vision’ was a formulaic representation of how the Nonconformists saw themselves vis-à-vis their Anglican counterparts – this was Hall’s version: Whenever we turn our eyes, we shall perceive the depression of religion is in proportion to the elevation of the hierarchy. In France, where the establishment had attained the utmost splendour, piety had utterly decayed; in England, where the hierarchy is less splendid, more remains of the latter; and in Scotland, whose national church is one of the poorest in the world, a greater sense of religion appears among the inhabitants, than in either of the former. It must likewise be plain to every observer, that piety flourishes much more among dissenters, than among the members of any establishment whatever. This progress of things is so natural, that nothing seems wanting in any

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Coleridge, Revision and Romanticism country, to render the thinking part of the people infidels but a splendid establishment. It will always ultimately debase the clerical character, and perpetuate both in discipline and doctrine, every error and abuse.10

Hall’s ‘splendid establishment’ and Coleridge’s ‘painted patched-up old Harlot’ were, in effect, attacks on the wealth of the Anglican clergy. As the state’s largest landowner, the Established Church had benefited tremendously from the enclosure of arable terrain that was taking place in the countryside. Between the first decade of the eighteenth century and the fourth decade of the nineteenth, benefice values on average tripled. This new affluence would have been especially visible since it was those at the base of the hierarchy who reaped the greatest profit: for the curate neither endowed with vicarages nor rectories the rise was nearly six-fold.11 The numerous financial impositions instituted by the ‘men in Black robes’ in the name of their elaborate establishment; the contrast offered by a freely roaming, freely available ‘Religion’; the conspicuous ‘dress & gestures’ of ‘Sensuality’ – if there is a single issue running through these images, it is surely the view that the Established Church represented an unacceptable prostitution of Christian ethics to a commercial ethos. Coleridge’s ‘lily-handed Sermonizer’ in the fifth lecture caricatured this new generation of Anglican preachers: wealthy, erudite and completely out of touch with ‘the Poor Man’. A most trenchant indictment if we are to believe John Walsh that most of the eighteenth-century clergy saw themselves first and foremost not as priestly mediators between God and Man, dispensing the sacraments, but as pastoral educators and spiritual guides.12

3.2 The Last Anglican (1811) England was probably worse off in 1811 than in 1940, when the nation faced the might of Hermann Wilhelm Göring’s Luftwaffe. The Great Enemy in the century before was French imperialism, it being indicative of the sense of overall crisis that even the liberal periodicals may be found chanting the familiar tropes of Fortress Britain: all too solitary and much in danger from an invasion. It is a mark of a beleaguered country that internal dissensions are characterized by an almost hysterical intensity; ‘the prodigies of the times’, according to the Edinburgh Review, ‘have nearly put an end to all neutrality and moderation in politics’. England, this reviewer would have his readers believe, was on the brink of civil war.13 He elicited a response, The Faction Detected and Despised (1810), from which we can discern a few of the embers beneath the smoke of political contention: Francis Burdett, John Horne Tooke, John Gale Jones, Roger O’Connor (‘brother to the rebel and traitor Arthur O’Connor), ‘Waithman’ (‘a liveryman of London, a linen-draper, chief ranter in the Common-Hall’),14 ‘Wardle’ (‘the temporary idol of the London rabble’), ‘Wood’ (‘Sheriff of London’)15 and William Cobbett.16 These were the names associated with the politicization of the lower

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orders, they were the Edinburgh reviewer’s ‘democrats . . . for revolution and republicanism’ whose ability to marshal ever larger crowds in London was a worrying sign of the growing power of the Enemy to threaten ‘the existence of the nation’ from within.17 With ‘Death or Burdett scrawled over the houses of the metropolis’, how many among the governing class would really be soothed by the opinion offered in The Faction Detected that it was ‘done, in one night, by a dozen mischievous fellows’? In the immediate advent of the widespread rioting caused by Burdett’s committal to the Tower of London on April 9, this pro-government pamphleteer refused to believe there was anything like real and substantial discontent in the country. ‘I hear of it in sounds, but I cannot trace it in acts.’ England, by his account, was in the midst of a Golden Age. [C]ommerce flourishing to an extent unknown to the former history of the world; manufacturers rapidly improving in fabric, ingenuity, and taste; immense capitals advantageously embarked in the structure of docks, roads, harbours, and canals; these are the best and proudest proofs of national prosperity, a satisfied population, and a wise system of government.18 Invasion was a chimera, French hopes of landing a credible expeditionary force on English soil ended with the destruction of their navy in 1805. Under Arthur Wellesley (later 1st Duke of Wellington), in command from 1809, the combined Anglo-Spanish-Portuguese forces were achieving decisive successes on the Continent. Though the empire of Napoleon Bonaparte still had to reach its greatest extent the threat to England was economic rather than military, from the recrudescence of discontent at home rather than an invasion from abroad. As for the economic miracle celebrated by the pamphleteer, it was equally chimerical: a mirage founded on a short-lived speculative boom. The year 1811 in which Coleridge published his allegoric vision as ‘Superstition, Religion, Atheism’, was to be the worst economically in the reign of George III. Exports to northern Europe (including France) were barely 20 per cent of the level they had been in 1810.19 Liberal productions, such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812) took the opportunity to manufacture more gloom and doom. Thy baseless wealth dissolves in air away, Like mists that melt before the morning ray . . . Sad, on the ground thy princely merchants bend Their altered looks, and evil days portend, And fold their arms, and watch with anxious breast The tempest blackening in the distant West.20 Relations with the United States were rapidly deteriorating. Those who live by the sword, should expect to die by the sword: Barbauld projected a future when ‘England . . . be . . . known / By the gray ruin and the mouldering stone’ – when

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Americans would roam the ‘chill sepulchral’ remains of London with the same wonder and sadness that was aroused in travellers by the antiquities of Athens. This partisanship was carried forward in the press, with the Opposition newspapers – in Coleridge’s words – looking ‘at every distressful fact with one eye only, fixed on the distress’ (EOT (CC), II, pp. 153–154). This is observable in the Morning Chronicle, which was ever mindful of the sufferings of the common people, ever suspicious over the particulars of Wellington’s victories and ‘never slow to give credit to British disaster’ (EOT (CC), II, p. 166). As a writer for a government newspaper then, Coleridge should always be ready to acclaim British successes. We can detect this in ‘The Regent and Mr. Perceval’ – the first article of the year to bear his initials – which insisted upon the existence of ‘far more public spirit, far less and less gross corruption, in the present than in any former generation since the restoration of the second Charles’ (EOT (CC), II, p. 119)! Whatever were the national circumstances, whether consciously or subconsciously, his conclusions were predicated on a party-based politic of maintaining a merry England. The domestic disturbances worsened with the economic crisis. 1811, as Edward P. Thompson’s classic treatise on the English working class puts it, ‘added the supreme grievance of continuous hunger to existing grievances’.21 Labourers were smashing machines in Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Derbyshire; in the increasingly acrimonious climate the Courier recorded an occasion when hissing crowds gathered outside its office in London (EOT (CC), I, p. cxlv). When Coleridge revised his ‘allegoric vision’ of 1795, he was again facing the prospect of mob violence; but where he had been persecuted back then as a ‘damn’d Jacobine’ by the followers of Church-and-King, 16 years later, in a weird game of musical chairs, he was now the loyalist and the crowds the so-called ‘democrats . . . for revolution and republicanism’. The situation in 1811 was the more ominous for coming on top of parliamentary troubles. February saw the Prince of Wales appointed Regent in recognition of the king’s insanity, which did not occur until after the Perceval administration successfully limited the constitutional powers of the position. An understandable enough move considering the Prince’s long association with the Whig Opposition, if just as clearly not the most conciliatory of gestures. Tory hegemony seemed to depend on the recovery of George III, but in August – when Coleridge published ‘Superstition, Religion, Atheism’ in the Courier – it was widely feared that the king’s death was imminent. Pro-government newspapers (including the Courier) were issuing daily bulletins on the state of the king’s health. In the same month, Thomas Moore wrote to Lady Donegal that the news of the death might even ‘interrupt the performance at the playhouses’ (ML, I, p. 156). Not surprisingly, given his Whig sympathies, the Irish poet and songwriter really had ‘no fear whatever’; Moore even joked of being ‘very well satisfied’ if the death of George III could wait for his ‘piece’ to finish its run at the theatres (ML, I, p. 156)!

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After the abolition of the Slave Trade in 1806, the sole Foxite principle that could find broad approval during the war years was the cry on behalf of the Catholics. It had supporters even in the ranks of the government: the majorities defeating Grattan’s and Lord Donoughmore’s motions on behalf of the Irish Catholics in 1811 were the slimmest yet.22 George III, throughout his reign, had been adamant against ‘Catholic Emancipation’; facing the prospect of a Whig-friendly Prince Regent coming into his own, not to mention a radical Opposition emboldened by popular support on the ground, loyalists feared that the death of the king would open the proverbial floodgates to the reform party. For the ‘Catholic Question’ was an inextricable part of the wider controversy over civil liberty. According to the Annual Register, the ‘efforts of the Irish Catholics to obtain an equality of civil rights with their fellow subjects cannot fail of exciting a lively interest in all who speculate upon that important topic, the connexion of religious with political establishments’. In the ensuing ‘debates’, its editor insisted that ‘it will be impossible not to perceive an approach towards that state of public opinion which leads to the maxim, that difference in religious worship ought to make no difference in civil rights’.23 To government zealots, this was Whig poison. ‘It was not to be supposed that the catholic petition was now more agreeable to the nation, because the public voice was less loud against it than formerly.’ As Prime Minister Spencer Perceval proposed on 31 May 1811, ‘The feeling would be roused again the moment that the danger seemed probable’.24 Coleridge’s ‘Superstition, Religion, Atheism’ is a hard-line response to the ‘Catholic Question’, his lurid imagery a deliberate ploy to play on national prejudices, to harden hearts against the aiders and abettors of Catholic emancipation. The ‘men in Black robes’ are now ‘clothed in ceremonial robes’; alongside the revised references to the taking of offerings and the ritual sprinkling of water, it is evident that the ‘Directors’ of the people are no longer Anglican churchmen but Catholic priests (EOT (CC), II, pp. 263–264). This was political mudslinging, it being well known that Burdett the darling of the London crowds was a staunch supporter of Catholic claims.25 So was Cobbett who founded the Political Register, the workingman’s favourite newspaper; indeed, it was a slur on the whole reform movement since the reformers generally supported Catholic emancipation.26 Worse follows. Presiding over the great hall of the cathedral to ‘Superstition’ is this monstrous statue of St Dominic (the portion that I have italicized is exclusive to the allegoric vision that Coleridge published in 1811): a vast idol, framed of iron bars intercrossed, which formed at the same time an immense cage, and yet represented the form of a human Colossus. On the base of this statue I read engraven the words: ‘To Dominic, holy and merciful, the preventer and the avenger of soul-murder.’ But below I saw the dim reliques of Runic characters, which seemed to imply a greater antiquity, and the whole form of the statue was probably first impressed on my fancy by the wicker idol of Woden, which, as children,

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Coleridge, Revision and Romanticism we have all seen pictured in the common history-books of our rude ancestors. (EOT (CC), II, pp. 263–264)

In November 1810 when the Examiner learnt that Coleridge was to return to the Courier, it took a pre-emptive swipe at his ‘crampt’ prose style and the general ‘difficulty of getting at [his] meaning’.27 I will address in Section 3.3, Coleridge’s response to the charge of obscurity that was repeatedly levelled at him; for the next paragraph, however, simply take note of the layer upon layer of allusion that has to be picked through in order to reach a coherent interpretation of this nightmarish representation of St Dominic. The Dominicans, an order suppressed from England and Ireland in 1559, once formed the élite of the Inquisition (EOT (CC), II, p. 264 footnote 2). This Protestant’s Monster, as the quotation insinuates, has an even more monstrous parent: the ancient worship of Odin. What ‘children’ learnt was that people were imprisoned in the ‘wicker idol of Woden’ and burnt as sacrifice. St Dominic as ‘the preventer . . . of soul-murder’, where ‘soul-murder’ is understood to be ‘religious toleration’ (EOT (CC), II, p. 264 footnote 2), presents Roman Catholicism as the very apotheosis of intolerance. We have only half the story here however, as there is a similar dream statue in the Watchman (1796): [The] statue of a Negroe . . . At the foot of [which] were engraved these words: – TO THE AVENGER OF THE NEW WORLD The head of the figure was naked, his arm stretched out, his eye sublime, the whole attitude noble, and commanding awe: the wrecks of twenty sceptres were scattered round him. (Watchman (CC), p. 164) In Coleridge’s dream of 1796, the West Indies were ‘free and happy’; the statue, said the ‘Negro’ guide, commemorated the ‘Washington’ who led the people to a violent revolution in which ‘English, Spanish, Dutch, all’ were put to ‘the sword’ (Watchman (CC), pp. 163–164). Furnished with some of the most colourful epithets in the Coleridgean repertoire, in a language he might well describe in his later years as ‘violent’ or ‘fiery’, it is easy to see why his old warning to the advocates of Slavery might have been remembered. ‘EXTREMES MEET’, announced the Examiner in that November issue: ‘Mr. COLERIDGE, once a republican and a follower of TOM PAINE, is now a courtier and a follower of SPENCER PARCEVAL [sic]’.28 And what Perceval wanted, if his speech of 31 May 1811 is anything to go by, was a public outcry against the Catholic petition. Coleridge’s St Dominic utilizes the inflammatory typology of his ‘Negroe . . . Washington’ to offer an apocalyptic vision of an unfree and unhappy England; it was a warning to the Protestant advocates of Catholic emancipation that abolishing the existing ‘connexion of religious with political establishments’

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would result not in religious liberty but religious despotism, specifically, a regression into Catholic domination. The issues raised by the ‘Catholic Question’ became especially tendentious when Ireland was factored in. On the English side, John Joseph Dillon’s Considerations on the Necessity of Catholic Emancipation (1811) was the most supportive of the Irish Catholics: ‘[the government] would not give liberty to Ireland without Union in 1795, and having drawn Ireland, solely by the inducement of expectation [of Catholic emancipation], into Union in 1801; it has refused, even in 1811, liberty to Ireland with Union!’29 The intransigent opposition of the ruling establishment at granting political ‘liberty’ to Catholics was, simply put, an act of bad faith. This assurance that they would be emancipated after the union of Britain and Ireland had come from William Pitt himself. The Prime Minister at the time could not fulfil his promise due to the opposition of George III and the cabinet, which resulted in him resigning from office (on 3 February 1801). Catholic emancipation was long overdue, and, as Dillon had highlighted in an earlier pamphlet, continuing to deny it would be particularly unfair, for the repeal of the ‘Irish Test Act . . . in favour of the dissenters’ had left ‘EXCLUSION FROM PARLIAMENT’ ‘imposed solely upon Catholics’.30 Here is Coleridge’s ‘Temple of Superstition’ in the Courier, and I have again italicized the portion that is unique to the 1811 version: It was made half visible by the wan phosphoric rays which proceeded from inscriptions on the walls, in letters of the same pale and visionary light. I could read them, methought; but though each one of the words taken separately I seemed to understand, yet when I took them in sentences, they were riddles and incomprehensible. Two only of very many remained in my memory, after I awoke. Of the one these were the words: ‘Accursed be the persecutor, that withholds the poisoned dagger from the holy ones, who would stab him therewith’. The other was: ‘Separate and yet combine the object and the pretext: for the life of the crab is not in its shell or claws, but the one is its safe-guard, and the other its tools’. As I stood meditating on these hard sayings, my guide thus addressed me – the fallible becomes infallible, and the infallible remains fallible. Read and believe: these are MYSTERIES! – In the middle of the vast hall the Goddess was placed. Her features blended with darkness, rose to my view, terrible, yet vacant. (EOT (CC), II, p. 265) The reference added in 1811 to Papal infallibility, one of the ‘MYSTERIES’ distinctive to the Church of Rome, demonstrates the overall effort on the author’s part to redeploy his allegory against Catholicism. What is peculiar to the 1811 version is the historicity of the revision: it shall forthwith be shown that Coleridge’s ‘hard sayings’ contain topical allusions that portray the suppression of Irish Catholics as an inevitable necessity. Ideologically and politically, the inclusiveness of the ‘Catholic Question’ was as much the strength of the reform movement as it was its primary weakness.

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The first of the ‘phosphoric . . . inscriptions’ concerns the controversy over the veto, or the right of the Crown to have a negative power in the appointment of Catholic bishops. John Milner, acting on behalf of the Irish Catholic hierarchy, had offered the veto as a concession for Catholic emancipation.31 However, when the Whigs duly forwarded the ‘security’ in Parliament on 25 May 1808, it caused such popular outrage in Ireland that their bishops (including Milner) went into a U-turn against ‘the Veto’. What followed were repeated attempts, from 1809 to 1810, by the proponents of emancipation in England to persuade the Irish to accept the veto as a constitutional safeguard; as Grattan argued in his Speech on the Catholic Petition (1810), the Pope’s situation as Napoleon’s prisoner necessitated a ‘domestic check’ to French interference in Irish affairs. Let me suppose the Pope to be made by Bonaparte, to be a French subject, and to nominate by his direction Catholic bishops for Ireland. If under that circumstance an invasion should happen, I wish to know what would be our situation with French troops and French bishops in our country . . . [A] perpetual separation from the politics of France . . . should be our common faith; without it no Protestant is safe, and with it no Catholic is dangerous.32 No veto, no emancipation; or, in the words of Moore’s A Letter to the Roman Catholics of Dublin (1810), ‘that Protestants should throw away the last fragment of the penal sword, while the Papal stiletto [my italics] is still in the hands of the Catholics: – it is folly to expect, and insult to ask it!’33 Considered as an emblem of the political power and will of the so-called ‘Papists’ Coleridge’s ‘poisoned dagger’ expresses their inveterate hatred for Protestants, which in 1811 seemed amply justified by the complete failure of the English Catholics to conciliate the Irish to the veto. His second ‘phosphoric’ saying develops on this sense of threat by alluding to the most radical faction under the emancipation banner: the O’Connor-led movement for Irish independence. For these ‘rebels’ – Coleridge insisted in the Courier, 18 days before ‘Superstition, Religion, Atheism’ – ‘Catholic Emancipation is of no more importance than a child’s rattle’, a mere pretext for their true objectives: ‘Repeal of Union – Popish Parliament – separation from Great Britain – and, perhaps, other connections’ (EOT (CC), II, p. 255). Given the insurgent fecundity of Irish republicanism, from the part played by Arthur O’Connor in the invasion scare of 1798, to Roger O’Connor’s cantankerous popularity on the London scene, what Coleridge leaves unsaid is the bugbear of a French–Irish alliance. It was the fear of Whig and Tory alike, underlying their very different responses to the ‘Catholic Question’. For the Whigs, Catholic emancipation was an important step towards reconciliation:34 Dillon depicted it as ‘the only means by which Ireland could be reconciled to the Union’35 and Grattan – to keep the loyalty of the ‘Catholic seamen and soldiers’.36 Tory politicians, on the other hand, represented emancipation as a

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privilege to be earned through good behaviour. As far as Viscount Castlereagh was concerned, ‘[those] increased obstacles to the measure of extending further political indulgences to the Catholics had arisen out of their own conduct and declarations’.37 It was standard strategy to focus on the radicalness of the Irish campaign to repudiate the Whig panacea of Catholic emancipation: no reconciliation was possible because Irish demands were insatiable. In fact, given the temper of the times, hardliners warned that Catholic emancipation would allow these desperadoes to subvert the establishment. ‘Superstition, Religion, Atheism’ returns over and over again to the implacable hatred of Catholic for Protestant, so as to better emphasize its vision of post-emancipation England as every Anglican’s worst nightmare. In this green and pleasant land, where St Dominic is revered in Church, the ‘matronly . . . RELIGION’ of our visionary is left a homeless vagrant. Of those who resisted the dictates of the Dominicans, ‘the more numerous part’ have been so disillusioned by their ‘impostures’ that ‘the very sound’ of ‘RELIGION’ has become odious to them. Only a few stay to hear her out, and even then ‘with cautious circumspection’. Despite partaking of the revelations offered by her ‘optic glass’ the visionary leaves her to rejoin the irreligious. Perhaps his prejudices have proven too deeply ingrained; his departure also indicates that her newfound followers will eventually abandon her, which explains her initial solitariness. The visionary and his irreligious compatriots ‘journied on, goading each other with remembrances of past oppressions’ until they come upon ‘a vast and dusky cave’. Here some fall prey to ‘SENSUALITY’, some to ‘BLASPHEMY’, still others to an ‘old dim-eyed man’; only the visionary remains unfettered by these demons, but the complacence that allows him to laugh at the atheistical pedantry of the old man evaporates when a French-Irish crowd suddenly materializes to mob him – all of the following is specific to the 1811 publication: [L]o! a crowd of fiends rushed in on me, sometimes in the feverish confusion of my thought appearing as figures, here French faces, some with red caps and with crosses, and behind them an Hibernian variety of the Centaur genus, composed of a deranged man and mad bull; and sometimes as mere words and notions of the Irish massacre, and St. Bartholomew’s, and the Septembrizers, and the whole Pandemonium of persecutors, from the St. Dominic, to the Atheists Marat, Carrier, and Buonaparte. (EOT (CC), II, pp. 269–270) The concord of Catholicism with atheism was an idea strenuously promulgated by the opponents of Emancipation. As ‘Albion’ of Catholic Emancipation Discussed and Exploded (1810) pointed out, Napoleon worshipped both ‘the goddess of reason’ and ‘the Catholic faith’.38 Castlereagh drew attention to Irish activism in order to rake up fears of ‘Catholics . . . forming associations

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with men of jacobinical principles’ to overthrow Church and State;39 for the propertied classes of course, a ‘jacobinical’ man was stereotypically a revolutionary and an atheist. In the 1811 ‘ALLEGORIC VISION’, the ‘old dim-eyed man’ (Coleridge’s emblem for atheism) identifies ‘SUPERSTITION’ (his emblem for Catholicism) as his ‘crazy sister’ (EOT (CC), II, p. 269). The French have been demonized as atheists since the 1790s; what the long quoted passage makes evident as well is the dehumanization of Irish Catholics, which, contrary to modern historical opinion, has been proceeding apace well before the 1820s.40 The pejorative view expressed in Catholic Emancipation Discussed and Exploded – ‘the Irish differ[ing] as much, in comfort, wealth, and moral principle, from all other members of the Christian church in the British empire, as the Malays do from all other inhabitants of the East’41 – coming from 1810 is surprising when we consider how the travel writers of the preceding generation, such as Arthur Young, used to expatiate upon the health and beauty of the Irish peasantry. Just as startling is the extent to which the new anti-Irish sentiments are directly attributable to the avowed opponents of Catholic emancipation. The Irish people were not only deprived and depraved, in Castlereagh’s view, their religious devotion was also of the most fanatically dangerous kind. For the ‘Catholic hierarchy’ directing their ‘minds’ was supposedly ‘in a state of more complete and unqualified dependence upon a foreign authority, than any other Catholic Church . . . in Europe’.42 With this gesture to the cosmopolitanism of Catholic allegiances the spectre of a French– Irish alliance once again rears its gory head: [T]he times may return when the power and influence of the See of Rome, if not restrained by wholesome regulations (a supposition not extravagant, when the visible head of the Catholic Church is a prisoner, and consequently an instrument in the hands of the enemy), may be turned against the temporal interests and security of the state.43 Irish men were notable for drinking and fighting, but the ferocity at which Coleridge deployed the familiar stereotype in ‘Spirits’ was quite unprecedented. The ‘appetite of the lower Irish for spirits’ in a country where ‘a man may be mad-drunk for threepence’ is used to reinforce an impression of their ‘wild’, ‘halfhuman’ bestiality (EOT (CC), II, pp. 174–176). What had been for Milner, in 1808, ‘quickness and warmth of sentiment’44 – was for Coleridge, in 1811, ‘a general inflammability of temperament’ (EOT (CC), II, p. 175). This ‘disposition’, which in Milner ‘tends to produce broils amongst the lower order of them’ – becomes, in the later article, a sinister penchant for armed rebellion against what ‘they either feel or imagine’ to be the ‘tyranny of the British Government’. The available evidence suggests that the Irish community in England doubled in size from 1780 to 1812.45 ‘Catholic’ came to be as synonymous with ‘Irish’ as

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‘Atheist’ was with ‘French’, a process that had as much to do with the brute facts of Irish immigration as with anti-emancipation propaganda. The Relief Act of 1791, which legalized Roman Catholic worship and the building of chapels, coinciding as it did with the so-called ‘Irish deluge’, was to result in the opening of nearly 900 new churches by 1814.46 ‘In various parts of the metropolis, the bell of the host is every day heard to sound; while, in the country, magnificent chapels are seen to rise for the purpose of immuring innocent victims – not for instruction, but for life!’47 This specimen of religious bigotry from ‘Albion’ would doubtlessly have found as many sympathetic bosoms then as among metropolitans today if, say, as free and as rapid a development of mosques were to take place. The pattern of Irish settlement – in the poorest districts of London, in the ‘disaffected’ regions of the industrial Midlands and the North – and the prominence of the Irish radicals were highlighted by the pro-government writers in such a way as to make the Irish odious to their readers. Two of the eight ‘directors of the mob’ identified by The Faction Detected were Irish; in the Courier of 25 May 1811, Coleridge insisted that Burdett’s crowds were garnered from ‘St. Giles’ and ‘Little Hell’ – the very areas of London where the Irish migrants were concentrated. It is a short step from being an undesirable social element to being a burden. The Irish in London were counted in 1814, and despite finding over 14,000 of them the philanthropists responsible proposed the probability of having missed half the group.48 In a city increasingly epitomized in Romantic writing as a place of squalor, ridden with crime and immorality, who could believe that there were so few Irish? From a hard-line perspective, the schism between English and Irish Catholics over the veto was a two-edged sword; while it deprived the Catholic proposal of much of its legitimacy, which was especially fortuitous in the context of the all-time high support for ‘Catholic principles’, it was also recognized that the complete disappointment of Catholic hopes might incite the Irish to seek a less constitutional mode of redress. It is a testament to the success of government propaganda that even the liberals came to be preoccupied with the Irish Catholic’s capacity for violence. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s An Address to the Irish People (1812) regarded an Irish revolution as an imminent possibility: I expect to be accused of a desire for renewing in Ireland the . . . horror . . . mark[ing] the struggles of France twenty years ago. But it is the renewal of that unfortunate æra, which I strongly deprecate, and which the tendency of this [publication] is calculated to obviate.49 On 17 May 1811, Secretary Ryder was to introduce into the House of Commons a bill for the interchange of militia between Britain and Ireland. The purpose of this measure never mentioned in Parliament ‘from motives of delicacy’ was, nonetheless, ‘obvious’: to quarter an expeditionary force in Ireland for ‘the suppression of the disturbance that may [my italics] arise from the disappointed

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hopes of the majority of the people respecting their civil or religious privileges’.50 English fears were such that the policy admitted no question. The bill was passed without amendment within a single month. Moreover, at the time of ‘Superstition, Religion, Atheism’, there was talk that the government should proceed to suspend habeas corpus in Ireland. Coleridge’s article ended with a quotation from Petrarch proffering the ‘ALLEGORIC VISION’ as a remedy (‘remedia’) for the false opinions (‘Falsis opinionibus’) agitating English society (EOT (CC), II, p. 270). His scenarios of Catholic domination and of FrenchIrish aggression in the 1811 version can be read as part of a larger effort to dispel from the body politic the ‘heartburn’ – so to speak – of religious and racial equality. If these ungodly visions served a purpose it was to legitimize the oppression of Catholics, especially of Catholic Irishmen, by portraying them above all as the Enemy within.

3.3 Two-Faced Gods (1817) You have yourself observed that few converts were made by Burke; but the cause which you have assigned does not sufficiently explain why a man of such powerful talents and so authoritative a reputation should have produced so little an effect upon the minds of the people. Was it not because he neither was nor could be generally understood . . . You have told me that the straightest line must be the shortest; but do not you yourself sometimes nose out your way, hound-like, in pursuit of truth, turning and winding, and doubling and running when the same object might be reached in a tenth part of the time by darting straightforward like a greyhound to the mark? Burke failed of effect upon the people for this reason, – there was the difficulty of mathematics without the precision in his writings. (Friend (CC), II, pp. 498–499) Southey wrote the above in response to Coleridge’s request for a letter criticizing his new periodical, The Friend. Though he did not wait for Southey’s reply, his answer to the imagined correspondence – published in the 11th number, as ‘Letter to R. L.’ – is instructive: I could not therefore be surprised, however much I may have been depressed, by the frequency with which you hear The Friend complained of for its’ [sic] abstruseness and obscurity; nor did the highly flattering expressions, with which you accompanied your communication, prevent me from feeling its’ [sic] truth to the whole extent. (Friend (CC), II, p. 150) The ‘difficulty’ of Coleridge’s publications, it would seem, was already something of a cliché in 1809, but what might have been in Southey’s opinion a subject ‘for jesting’, had become by the third version of his allegoric vision a

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veritable albatross round his neck. Thirteen of the sixteen reviews on Christabel had savaged the poem on the account of its opacity, and his reputation was such that The Statesman’s Manual (1816) had actually been condemned for abstruseness three months before its publication. According to the anticipatory review, there was no point in waiting for the work because it would be just as impossible to tell what he was on about (CCH, I, pp. 248–253)! The third allegoric vision appeared in the introductory section of Coleridge’s Lay Sermon . . . on the Existing Distresses and Discontents (1817). That the criticism deeply affected him is clear enough from his correspondence, which stressed the simplicity of the ‘second sermon’ on two separate occasions (CL, IV, pp. 705–706 & 712–713). Gone from the 1817 version were those mystifyingly allusive passages that a Southey might have been tempted to describe as having ‘the difficulty of mathematics without the precision’. [O]n her bosom she wore the image of a snail with its horns, or organs of touch, protruded, and its eyes in its horns; and beneath the motto – Believe that alone which thou doest at once, see and feel. Her adoration, however, seemed directed to a picture before her of two snails connected together by a linked chain, proceeding from both, and by which each was to other at once male and female. (EOT (CC), II, p. 267) Vividly detailed, yet, at the level of semantics, profoundly laboured, this extract from the 1811 portrait of ‘SENSUALITY’ is characteristic of the material that Coleridge chose to remove. The passage in question has after all defied even a Bollingen editor’s attempt to illuminate it: David Erdman merely hints at its sexual content and the possibility of it having ‘an emblematic source’ (EOT (CC), II, p. 267 footnote 10). If Erdman has failed to uncover the ‘emblematic source’, it is because none exists. For how could one have depicted pictorially ‘two snails . . . by which each was to other at once male and female’? William Hazlitt was probably another incentive to drop the segment: Coleridge’s archenemy had trashed the similarly vague and sexually suggestive writing of Christabel as ‘something disgusting’ under a beautiful veil ‘like moon-beams playing on a charnel-house, or flowers strewed on a dead body’ (CCH, I, p. 207). The 1817 version features three new introductory paragraphs. They are as full of concrete detail, as luminous with implication as the deleted passages; the difference rests on the images employed, which are based on the familiar features of landscape and of ordinary experience. As I was journeying on foot through the Appennine, I fell in with a pilgrim . . . [whose conversation had] the freshness and colors of April: Qual ramicel a ramo, Tal da pensier pensiero In lui germogliava . . .

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Coleridge, Revision and Romanticism We had not long been fellow-travellers, ere a sudden tempest of wind and rain forced us to seek protection in the vaulted door-way of a lone chapelry: and we sate face to face each on the stone bench along-side the low, weather-stained wall, and as close as possible to the massy door. (LS (CC), pp. 132–133)

There is nothing here like the weird and fantastical manifestations of ‘Dominic’ and ‘SENSUALITY’ in the 1811 text, which bore a closer resemblance to the conceptual phenomena of Giambattista Piranesi’s Carceri d’invenzione (Imaginary Prisons, 1745)51 – or, in the case of Blasphemy’s ‘emblem of philanthropic justice’, to the densely referential cartoons of Issac Cruikshank and James Gilray.52 The tone of the new paragraphs is more relaxed, almost anecdotal. This was intentional; as Coleridge declared to Street, he wanted ‘the second Sermon’ to be accessible in ‘style and manner’ to ‘any man of common education and information’ (CL, IV, p. 713). So much of the 1811 revisions are undone that Reginald J. White is of the opinion that the 1817 version ‘follows more closely the 1795 one’ (LS (CC), p. 132 footnote 1). Coleridge might have expelled the images of Dominican oppression, of French-Irish malevolence, but the overall orientation of his allegory remains with the vision of 1811. The ‘Temple of Superstition’ is the Church of Rome, true ‘RELIGION’ is a typically nationalist idealization of the Established Church, and there is the same enforcement of kinship between Catholic ‘SUPERSTITION’ and ‘old man’ Atheism. Coleridge’s amenability to reform during the post-war years did not change his opposition to Catholic emancipation. On 17 September 1816, he expressed his ‘utmost desire to be convinced’ by the ‘Anti Emancipation Essays’ that would ‘soon appear in the Courier’ (CL, IV, p. 671). The general drift of his allegory was sufficiently apparent for ‘his Lay Sermons’ to draw out the following exposition from the Quarterly Review: Infidels and atheists in catholic countries hate their own church, even where it is most intolerant, less than they abhor the reformed religion, which, standing upon the sure ground of reason and Scripture, challenges the freest, fullest investigation. Infidelity indeed allies itself easily with the Romish church as a system which it may safely despise in the gross, which requires only externals, and compounds at a moderate rate for transgressions of every kind.53 Southey, the reviewer,54 bestowed the highest praise upon the Lay Sermons whom they serve with a blueprint for attacking the philosophical and religious tenets of the emancipation party. While the material that Coleridge deleted certainly included a lot of what was prejudicial towards Catholics, as well as to the French and the Irish, the perceived allies of Catholicism, his changes had nothing to do with a softening stance on Catholic emancipation.

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Apart from simplification, Coleridge revised the allegory in order to update it to more current concerns. Scenarios alluding to the wartime bogey of an allied French-Irish force, like the ‘crowd of fiends’ that literally invaded his dream vision of 1811, have become irrelevant with the final defeat of Napoleon. Similarly, it would have been just as pointless for him to continue bombarding the Irish Catholics when their cause was already losing ground. The Prince Regent, coming into his full powers, had done nothing for Catholic emancipation; Catholic prospects were looking even dimmer under the Liverpool administration, where the dread of change led to the pursuit of a whole array of repressive measures at home and in Ireland. According to the ‘Preface’ of the Annual Register, it was the suffering and unrest at the close of the continental war that most preoccupied the upper orders.55 Coleridge’s ‘second Sermon’, the work enclosing the 1817 allegory, had presented itself in the subtitle as a disquisition on the Existing Distresses and Discontents. This, as White indicates (LS (CC), p. 128 footnote 4), echoes Edmund Burke’s own Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents; indeed, a close examination of the 1817 vision will reveal distinctively Burkean reverberations. The dreamer in the text of 1817 is no longer Coleridge, but a man he met under a shelter during a rainstorm. Though the ‘pilgrim’ is never identified in the allegory, he did add this rather telling passage to the 1818 edition of The Friend: WHAT is that which first strikes us, and strikes us at once, in a man of education? And which, among educated men, so instantly distinguishes the man of superior mind, that (as was observed with eminent propriety of the late Edumund Burke) ‘we cannot stand under the same arch-way during a shower of rain, without finding him out?’ (Friend (CC), I, p. 448) In the allegoric vision, it is basically the pilgrim’s ‘discourse’ which Coleridge found so striking – to translate the Italian verse: ‘As a twig buds from a branch, so thought budded from thought in him’ (LS (CC), p. 132 footnote 1). That Burke had an extraordinary mind, that this would be obvious to anyone who should happen ‘by chance’ to be ‘with Burke under a shed, to shun a shower’ – these observations belong to Johnson, whose pronouncements were well-known to Coleridge and his contemporaries through Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson.56 The pilgrim’s sorrowful demeanour, ‘like an aged mourner on the sodded [sic] grave of an only one’ (LS (CC), p. 133), can also be connected to Burke who in the final years of his life suffered the loss of his son.57 In 1816, Longman published a four-volume compilation of Burke’s parliamentary Speeches. It was the first printing of any work by Burke in the second decade of the nineteenth century, and as the editor recorded in the ‘Introduction’ it had been produced in accordance with popular demand.58 By 1817, Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria could declare ‘the speeches and writings of

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EDMUND BURKE . . . more interesting at the present day, than they were found at the time of their first publication’ (BL (CC), I, p. 191). A Burkean presence in the allegory would pander to this new predilection for the statesman, which he had detected throughout the entire spectrum of political discourse. In his words, ‘not only the debates in parliament, not only our proclamations and state papers, but the essays and leading paragraphs of our journals are so many remembrances of EDMUND BURKE’ (BL (CC), I, p. 192). However, where Burke is reified in the Biographia Literaria – as ‘a scientific statesman’, whose ‘writings’ contain ‘the germs of almost all political truths’ (BL (CC), I, pp. 191, 217), the ‘remembrances’ in the second Lay Sermon are curiously tentative by comparison. The work has just one direct reference to the parliamentarian; it occurs in the footnote before the ‘ALLEGORIC VISION’, which inserts ‘Burke’ in a merely provisional manner into the list of writers that the student of ‘political economy’ is recommended to read (LS (CC), p. 128). In the politically charged climate of post-Napoleonic England, opinions about Burke divided along party lines. As the Tory government’s chief apologist during the pamphlet war of the 1790s, Whig estimations of him were predictably deprecatory. The Edinburgh Review, for example, denounced him in September 1816 as ‘the patron saint of those who love despotism’.59 A year later, Hazlitt’s assessment of ‘Coleridge’s Literary Life’ insisted that Burke was ‘not of sound and practical judgement, nor of high or rigid principles’.60 Excessively emotional, with a delusional and delusive imagination, such a mind – according to Hazlitt – served the interests of the ruling establishment by obfuscating facts, consequences and principles. The Whigs attributed the renewed popularity of Burke to the government party; in their view, the Tories were deploying him as an instrument for social control: This servile tribe have thus contrived to borrow the authority of Mr. Burke for their bad cause, and to persuade the unthinking mass of mankind, that they act in concert with that great man, in their warfare against the rights of the people, and their mockery of the champions of the Constitution.61 In the contest between Whig and Tory over the legacy of Burke, his subdued presence in the Lay Sermon is most peculiar when we consider how strongly Coleridge came out in his favour just four months later in the Biographia Literaria. Why utilize him at all to tell an anti-Catholic allegory, when he was noteworthy both for his Irishness and for his support for Catholic emancipation? There were 293 appearances of Burke in caricature from 1778 to 1797.62 This was only one less than the Prince of Wales, with neither the fact that he spoke with an Irish accent nor his Catholicity being lost upon the caricaturists who portrayed him in cartoon after cartoon as a Catholic priest.63 More than a decade after his death, when Burke, Fox and Pitt were invoked as Spectres Visiting John Bull (see Figure 3.3) to denounce a vote of thanks for effecting the

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Figure 3.3 Spectres Visiting John Bull, 23 February 1808 (engraving) by John Williams. © Trustees of the British Museum.

surrender of the Danish navy, he was identified to a new generation of customers by his priestly biretta. Equally significant are his spectacles and the book he has in hand on the ‘Sublime & Beautiful’. Burke’s detractors often referred to his spectacles to impute to him a myopic vision of the world, and this is emphasized here through the gross enlargement of his most famous work on aesthetics. There is of course someone else in the allegoric vision that has poor vision and a distorted aesthetic, Coleridge’s ‘old dim-eyed man, poring with a microscope over the Torso of a statue’. Behind the Burkean visionary of Biographia Literaria and The Friend, in the darkest depths of the allegory, hides the ‘Catholic’ Burke of the Whigs: I burst into laughter, which instantly turned to terror – for as he started forward in rage, I caught a glance of him from behind; and lo! I beheld a monster bi-form and Janus-headed, in the hinder face and shape of which I instantly recognized the dread countenance of SUPERSTITION – and in terror I awoke. (LS (CC), p. 137) In early stage of the French revolution, before the Peace of Amiens, the Janus image when used pejoratively signified political inconstancy. Coleridge had applied it to Napoleon, and to Prime Minster Henry Addington (EOT (CC), I, pp. 212, 304), but in the broader context it remained with Burke. William Dent’s Peachum and Lockit (BM Satires 7627), published in February 1790, had

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a picture of him as ‘The Sublime and Beautiful Janus’. ‘Speaking on English Affairs’, Burke turns to the left crying, ‘Hurled by Providence from the Throne’, while ‘Speaking on French Affairs’, he turns to the right declaiming that ‘Kings should be held Sacred’. The cartoon was a response to the about turn performed by the Reflections on the Revolution in France, where Burke ‘held [kings] up . . . as sacred abstractions’ completely contradicting – as Hazlitt reminded his readers in 1817 – his earlier opinion of them as ‘the lowest and worst of mankind’.64 It was, however, from November 1795, when he ‘crossed over the House of Commons from the Opposition to the Ministry’ that he really came into his own as the inconsistent man of political action.65 To Whig reformers, the two-faced statesman could only have been Edmund Burke. ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, published in 1823, records Hazlitt’s very first observation to Coleridge: ‘I ventured to say that I had always entertained a great opinion of Burke, and that (as far as I could find) the speaking of him with contempt might be made the test of a vulgar democratical mind.’ Though this was said ‘in the year 1798’, when ‘Mr. Coleridge came to Shrewsbury’, the origin of the essay rests in post-Napoleonic Britain – a period in time when the legacy of Burke was so politicized that Hazlitt felt he could not admire him without ‘betraying’ the reform movement.66 At a time when commenting on Burke was literally revealing of the political colours of the commentator, the ‘bad’ Burke in the third allegoric vision may be similarly indicative of Coleridge’s affiliations. Perhaps the man who had been denounced in 1810 as a ‘courtier . . . of Spencer Parcival’ was, in 1817, covertly feeling his way back to the Opposition. ‘All extremes meet’, said the Coleridgean traveller to the Burkean one – and they do indeed, in fact as well as in mind – somewhere in the thoroughfare between Whig and Tory.

Chapter 4

A Tale of Remorse

4.1 For the Glory of Shakespeare When Coleridge began Osorio at Nether Stowey, his love affair with the stage was already four years old. On 7 February 1793, he had penned these words to Mary Evans: Have you seen the Siddons this season? or the Jordan? An acquaintance of mine has a tragedy coming out early in the next Season – the principal character of which Mrs. Siddons will act. – He has importuned me to write the Prologue and Epilogue – but conscious of my inability I have excused myself with a jest – and told him – I was too good a Christian to be accessory to the damnation of any thing. (CL, I, p. 51) The two leading actresses in the country were Sarah Siddons and Dorothy Jordan, supreme respectively in the realms of tragedy and comedy. It was anticipated that by ‘the next Season’ their acting company would be installed in the new theatre building at Drury Lane, an immense edifice capable of containing over 3,600 spectators as well as the largest stage in Europe.1 While the aforementioned time did arrive with one new play by Richard Cumberland, it was a comedy and Mrs. Siddons had no part in it.2 Even so, Coleridge’s remarks should not be simply dismissed. He was infatuated with Evans and had been inclined, like many a young man, to puff himself up to his beloved. In all likelihood writing for Drury Lane was no inconvenience but something he dreamt about and actively sought after. The lack of confidence preventing him from writing that ‘Prologue’ for a Drury Lane play was nowhere present in the self-serving fashion by which he took over from Southey The Fall of Robespierre (1794), a three-act tragedy. Coleridge wrote the first act, revised the other two, and then published the whole under his own name on the reason that it would ‘sell at least an hundred Copies in Cambridge’ (CL, I, p. 106). Their play was probably based upon the 18 August 1794 account by the Times of Robespierre’s last days.3 The downfall of the French leader was sensational for being so unexpected, as the newspaper made clear:

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Of all the Chiefs of the different factions which have successively reigned in the volcano of the French Revolution, ROBESPIERRE was the man whose Government promised to be the most durable; because he had the character of being the most incorruptible, and of being the man who had shewn the least variation in his conduct.4 With intentional irony the play finds no one more willing to believe this version of political invincibility than Robespierre himself: Myself! the steel-strong Rectitude of soul And Poverty sublime ’mid circling virtues! The giant Victories, my counsels form’d, Shall stalk around me with sun-glittering plumes, Bidding the darts of calumny fall pointless.5 The ‘incorruptible’ Robespierre had a reputation for parading his ‘virtues’ in public.6 It is a characteristic that exposes ‘his stern morality’, according to Coleridge’s Tallien, as ‘The fair-mask’d offspring of ferocious pride’.7 The eponymous protagonist of Osorio also ‘doth believe himself an iron soul’ (PW (CC), III, p. 88); he was a Spanish prince whose ‘very Virtues’ – according to Albert – ‘Had pamper’d his swoln heart, and made him proud’ (PW (CC), III, p. 100).8 Coleridge was fixated with imperious rulers, and we know what the conventions of poetic justice bode for the proud. Within three months of The Fall of Robespierre came Coleridge’s next publication, a series of ‘Sonnets on Eminent Characters’ in the Morning Chronicle eulogizing ‘SIDDONS’ (sonnet ‘No. VIII’) and the proprietor of Drury Lane theatre ‘RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN’ (sonnet ‘No. XI’).9 Were these the effusions of a fan or a barefaced attempt to cosy up to a theatre company that he was considering sending a manuscript to? The sonnet that is closer to my theme is ‘No. VIII’, which tells Of Warlock Hags, that, at the ’witching time Of murky Midnight, ride the air sublime, Or mingle foul embrace with the Fiends of Hell – Cold Horror drinks its blood! Anon the tear More gentle starts, to hear . . . E’en such the shiv’ring joys thy tones impart; – E’en so thou, SIDDONS! meltest my sad heart!10 It is recapitulating scenes from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. To be specific, act four scene one, where Macbeth’s ‘secret, black, and midnight hags’ call up for him the powers of hell, and act five scene one, where the horror of his bloody deeds has finally reduced even his fiendish wife to a gibbering somnambulist.11

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Shakespeare’s supernatural tragedy is of course another play dealing with the downfall of a despot. The invincibility vaunted by Coleridge’s Robespierre resembles Macbeth’s own inflated effusions: Thou losest labour: As easy may’st thou the intrenchant air With thy keen sword impress, as make me bleed: Let fall thy blade on vulnerable crests; I bear a charmed life, which must not yield To one of woman born.12 These words are spoken to Macduff who soon slays the blustering tyrant. On the doorsteps of defeat, Osorio displays the same grandiose bellicosity: Woman, my life is thine! to thee I give it. Off! – he that touches me with his hand of flesh, I’ll rend his limbs asunder! I have strength With this bare arm to scatter you like Ashes! (PW (CC), III, p. 146) Osorio is, in fact, comparable in many respects to Macbeth. There is a long conjuration scene where what happens serves only the total defeat of the protagonist: as with Shakespeare it impels him to take the very course of action that gives birth to his eventual nemesis (Alhadra, the wife of Ferdinand). Alhadra’s desultory stroll at the opening of the fifth act is reminiscent of the pathos-ridden, sleepwalking undertaken by Lady Macbeth. In both instances a pair of observers frames the leading lady, and in both there is a conversation involving medical metaphors. The unparalleled esteem Shakespeare enjoys today owes much to the 1790s and early 1800s – a period Jonathan Bate aptly calls ‘the age of Bardolatry’.13 To make particular Shakespearean effects had been the challenge, ‘the task’ that the Romantic poets had set themselves.14 Coleridge’s Osorio is interesting for its relationship to this premise, and as evidence for the predominating influence of Macbeth. The Scottish tragedy had an especial prominence in the age of Bardolatry: exactly how and why this was so shall now be dealt with. ∗∗∗ From 1776 to 1800 the London theatres staged Macbeth 150 times. Except for another Shakespeare tragedy – Hamlet, Prince of Denmark – no other play of a serious nature was more frequently performed in the metropolis (London Stage, V, pp. clxxi–clxxii). Wordsworth’s statement in the ‘Preface’ to the Lyrical Ballads (1800), which has ‘the works of Shakespear . . . driven into neglect by . . . sickly and stupid German Tragedies’ cannot be supported historically.15

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In the season of 1797–1798, even when Germanic productions such as The Stranger and The Castle Spectre were at the height of their popularity on the boards of Drury Lane, plays by Shakespeare still featured as the main piece of entertainment on 31 days – the most so far for the new theatre house. There is even less evidence of this ‘neglect’ in contemporary drama criticism. Charles Dibdin’s A Complete History of the English Stage (1800) gave the lion’s share of his praise and attention to the works of Shakespeare. It is rather more likely to be indicative of an overriding interest to promote Shakespeare that such a laudatory bombast within the genre could have been indulged in: It remained for a genius, great, powerful, and commanding, with the majesty of HOMER, the judgement of AESCHYLUS, the sweetness of SOPHOCLES, the philosophy of EURIPIDES, the wit of ARISTOPHANES, and the truth of MENANDER, to reconcile so many jarring opinions and to perfect this chaos into a world. SHAKESPEAR was this genius . . . who, for his perfecting of the dramatic art, deserves the ineffable reverence of the ages; and who, for giving light to the theatrical world, might snatch the epitaph from the tomb of NEWTON.16 Dibdin was certainly no lone voice; the lobby promulgating the greatness of Shakespeare was vociferous enough for Drury Lane’s managers to decide, in 1795, to replace the statue of Apollo on top of the theatre house with one of the dramatist.17 If this never actually happened in the end, it was because the management had so overrun its budget for the building that the exterior could not be completed.18 Wordsworth’s allegation of ‘neglect’ should be interpreted as an exaggeration symptomatic of a time when it was impossible to celebrate Shakespeare adequately. If the deification of Shakespeare created problems for Drury Lane, an investigation into the official opening of the new theatre on 21 April 1794 would reveal that the managers really only had themselves to blame. It was customary at Drury Lane that a night of entertainment began with a poetical prologue. On this inaugural event was read a 50-line composition by Major General Fitzpatrick, which – according to Walley Chamberlain Oulton’s The History of the Theatres of London (1796): turned chiefly on the fostering shelter which the freedom and tranquillity of this country so happily give to the liberal arts [and the] erection of that theatre . . . as a monument to the Genius of SHAKESPEARE, more suitable ‘Then the proud Pyramid’s unmeaning mass’.19 Shakespeare’s birthday was two days away (on the 23rd of April). The extravagant behaviour detailed by Oulton seems harmlessly incidental until we notice

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the distinctively different presentation given by the Whig-aligned press, which consistently brought up the patriotic fervour of the occasion. For example, the Morning Chronicle related how Kemble delivered a prologue of great length, boasting of the freedom and happiness of this country at a time when all Europe was convulsed, and stating that, under the auspices of our glorious Constitution, this beautiful office was reared, and dedicated to the Arts.20 At these festivities, instead of ‘the Genius of Shakespeare’, Whig writers exposed the jingoistic nationalism of a country at war.21 Following the prologue was the main performance for the evening, ‘Macbeth’ – to stay with the Morning Chronicle – ‘represented with great magnificence of decoration, and with many novelties both in the conduct and machinery of the fable’. One of these innovations concerned the ‘Ghost of Banquo’, whose visible appearance was omitted so that ‘Macbeth bends his eye on vacancy’. It was a change theatre critics had long recommended,22 and it met with widespread approval. Nonetheless, this critical demand for a more understated naturalism was by and large resisted with the rest of the tragedy being – as the newspaper reviewer lamented – even more lavishly supernatural: In the Cauldron Scene, new groupes [sic] are introduced to personify the black spirits and white, blue spirits and grey; and here one would have imagined that the Muse of Fuseli had been the director of the scene . . . It is certain that in leaving the Ghost to be supplied by the imagination the illusion of the scene was strengthened; and why, after this valuable decorum, a more bold attempt was made to give substance and figure to the many coloured spirits of our bard, we affect not to say.23 Over the next few years, with the production of ever grander and showier plays, more and more writers would criticize this tendency towards spectacle in drama. The playwright George Colman the younger blamed the vast size of the new London theatres; according to him, these broad effects were encouraged because the proprietors believed that the success of their ‘representations’ depended on their being ‘better seen and heard at a distance’. Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’ to the Lyrical Ballads indicts ‘the encreasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident’24 – in other words, a vulgar and vulgarizing metropolitan culture. Colman’s judgement is something of an axiom today, echoing in every major account of English Romantic theatre,25 but Wordsworth added an important modification in presenting this movement towards the ‘extraordinary’ – and by implication his and Colman’s opposition to it – as motivated by the partialities of class. The cheapest seats were the furthest from the stage, so

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clearly, whether a production was enjoyable ‘at a distance’ would be of greater significance to that sector of society which invariably found itself congregating at the back in the Upper Gallery. While contributing little to the earnings of a theatre like Drury Lane, in terms of ticket sales, less than 2 per cent, their occupants were known as ‘the Gods’ with good reason – The Times newspaper on the inaugural proceedings of 21 April 1794: ‘[During] the evening, the Gods made a violent remonstrance against the chandeliers, which obstructed their view of the stage – they were soon appeased by a promise from Mr. Kemble, that the evil should be rectified’.26 Ignoring them could bring upon their betters seated lower down in the auditorium a shower of orange peel, or broken bottles, or even parts of the Upper Gallery, in other words, resulting in the kind of riotous behaviour that would ruin the evening for everyone.27 The transformation of Macbeth at Drury Lane into ‘a magnificent spectacle’ – to use the Morning Chronicle again28 – is also connectable to the patriotism that gave birth to General Fitzpatrick’s prologue. For someone sympathetic to the warmongering Tory establishment, bardolatry was an important avenue for asserting English ascendancy in the geopolitical rivalries of the time. Even in a chapter purportedly about the ‘STATE OF THE STAGE THROUGHOUT EUROPE AT THE BIRTH OF SHAKESPEAR’, Dibdin (who was always sonorous on ‘the bard’) just would not leave alone the greater contemporary successes of things Germanic: German tragedies and comedies, however, even to this hour, are clogged with the heaviness and gloom of the Dutch, of which they were originally imitations. Horrible noises, bloody swords, spectres, flaming torches, magic hands, tombs, dungeons, racks and every other subject to excite terror, pervade their tragedies, one would think to divert the auditor from either sleeping or venting his indignation at the intolerable dullness.29 The German principalities were keen competition in the European field of commerce.30 As for the cultural productions of France, his country’s strongest military rival, Dibdin was again predictably dismissive – in the very next paragraph: Thus the only nation that held out the shadow of a pretension to dramatic fame, even up to the time when SHAKESPEAR produced his first play, was FRANCE. There, indeed, appeared a dawn of something like regularity, but it was cold, tame, and obscure; being a Greek and Roman mixture improved by ingredients taken from the English, who had been at the source before them.31 The status of England was pegged to the reputation of Shakespeare,32 and if Drury Lane had to open with a Shakespeare play it could only have been Macbeth. For the work was uniquely disposed to the strengths of the theatre

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company. Its best actor John Philip Kemble, popularly upheld as the ‘FIRST TRAGEDIAN OF THE BRITISH STAGE’,33 had both the necessary physique and scholarly acumen to do the philosophizing warrior-king full justice. There were of course other similarly heroic roles in Shakespeare for Kemble – he was equally memorable in Hamlet as well as in Coriolanus – but these alternatives share one common failing: the lack of an important female character. This was a problem because Drury Lane depended on its star actresses to draw in the crowds; a glance at the company’s account books will show Siddons and Jordan on consistently higher salaries than their male counterparts.34 What truly distinguished Shakespeare’s Scottish tragedy was Lady Macbeth: it had in its ‘fiendlike Queen’ a perfect role for the company’s best actress who portrayed most successfully – to quote an admirer – ‘the great and awful in character’.35 With a story that culminates in a grand English victory it was the ideal play for the times, because of the ongoing war with France and because (together with overt supernaturalism) battle scenes were also the recognized prerequisites of ‘a magnificent spectacle’.36 A lavish production would testify to the cultural powers of the country’s leading theatre company. Through Macbeth, Drury Lane could display its impressive array of closely observed medieval costumes; this plus the scenography, which Thomas Greenwood, Thomas Malton and William Capon painted for the new house that was far grander and far more evocative than anything the company had ever before attempted.37 An 87-line ‘Epilogue’ by George Colman rounded off the festivities. ‘Miss Farren’, Drury Lane’s blonde bombshell, delivered the piece in the pose of a ‘Housekeeper, shewing off’ – The Times coyly informs us – ‘all the beauties and conveniences of the new building’.38 This included flooding the stage with ‘REAL water’ – and if we now interpolate the Morning Chronicle’s account – ‘on which a waterman, in his boat, passes to and fro’39 (obviously Macbeth had not quite demonstrated the new theatre house’s full capabilities). A more authentic theatrical experience was on offer, and a whole new level of safety. For the same technology could be used to put out a fire – from the ‘Epilogue’: In ample Reservoirs our firm reliance, Whose streams set Conflagration at defiance. Panic alone avoid, let none begin it – Shou’d the flame spread, sit still, there’s nothing in it; We’ll undertake to drown you all in half a minute.40 And there was more; because the stage seemed to be the most likely place to catch fire (fire-free productions must still deal with dozens of oil burners for general illumination), this building even came with an iron curtain to seal it away from the auditorium. ‘You’re safe at all events’, its audience was assured when the iron shield had been lowered, ‘The hottest fire shan’t singe a single feather’. As early as 118 years before William James Pirie’s unsinkable Titanic,

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on the verge of another European war, there was Henry Holland’s incombustible Drury Lane. The inaugural celebrations ended exactly where they began, with homage to Shakespeare – the final stanza of Colman’s ‘Epilogue’: The high decree is past – may future age, When pondering o’er the annals of our Stage, Rest on this time, when labour rear’d the pile, In tribute to the genius of our isle; This school of art, with British sanction grac’d, And worthy of a manly nation’s taste! And now the Image of our Shakespeare view, And give to Drama’s God the honour due.† †Here the Iron Curtain is taken up, and discovers the Statue of Shakspear, under the mulberry-tree, &c. &c.41 For this occasion ‘&c. &c.’ involved a gathering of Shakespeare characters, with the Tragic and Comic Muses, dancing and singing the nation’s favourite patriotic songs. ∗∗∗ ‘The history of appropriation’ – to return to Bate – ‘suggest[s] that “Shakespeare” is not a man who lived from 1564 to 1616 but a body of work that is refashioned by each subsequent age in the image of itself’.42 Even on a purely textual level, what the Romantics performed on stage was considerably different from what we now stage in the name of the dramatist. From the plays they favoured, to the scenes that they attached the greatest significance (of which a few were actually Romantic era modifications, if not outright additions), Shakespeare was primarily conceived as a creator of searing melodrama and grand misanthropic characters.43 Different periods, different cultures interpret Shakespeare differently. As far as Osorio was an attempt on Coleridge’s part to write tragedy in a Shakespearean manner, this effort was heavily influenced by the peculiar preoccupations of his time and place. Macbeth, for example, figures large because it was pre-eminent at Drury Lane. If a dialectical relationship between ‘text’ and ‘context’ is accepted, it should be possible to infer from Coleridge’s ‘Shakespearean effects’ (in the ‘text’) the determining historical conditions (in ‘context’). The sonnets on ‘SIDDONS’ and ‘SHERIDAN’ were republished in Coleridge’s Poems on Various Subjects (1796). In his first book of poetry, he took the praise he had bestowed upon Sheridan to an even greater pitch of epiphanic excess; where he originally conferred upon his idol ‘temples’ and ‘flowrets’ from ‘a mountain’ ‘famous for Honey’, in the second version of ‘SHERIDAN’, he

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added a lengthy footnote alluding to the personality’s ‘classical attainments, and . . . the exquisite sweetness and almost Italian delicacy of his Poetry’.44 Sheridan was, among other things, a Whig politician famous for his powers of oratory. He could even with some justice be considered the foremost dramatist in the country having written the most successful play of his generation, The School for Scandal.45 In the way of verse, however, even if we include the few songs gracing Sheridan’s popular comic opera, The Duenna, and the 112 lines he published in Memory of Garrick, his output is so meagre it makes the entire manoeuvre of Coleridge’s that much more obviously obsequious. Nonetheless, by the following winter, Coleridge managed to receive a proposition from Sheridan ‘to write a tragedy on some popular subject’ (CL, I, p. 304). The news was quickly communicated to Joseph Cottle (CL, I, p. 313), his most dependable publisher, and to Josiah Wade (CL, I, p. 316), who bankrolled his recent periodical, The Watchman (1796). Coleridge also used the request as a pretext to approach an associate of Sheridan’s, William Lisle Bowles, whom he provided with the following ‘plan’: [My] tragedy is too chaotic to be transmitted at present – but immediately I understand it myself, I will submit it to you: & feel greatly obliged to you for your permission to do it. – It is ‘romantic & wild & somewhat terrible’ – & I shall have Siddons & Kemble in my mind – but indeed I am almost weary of the Terrible, having been an hireling in the Critical Review for these last six or eight months – I have been lately reviewing the Monk, the Italian, Hubert de Sevrac . . . – in all of which dungeons, and old castles, & solitary Houses by the Sea Side, & Caverns, & Woods, & extraordinary characters, & all the tribe of Horror & Mystery, have crowded on me – even to surfeiting. (CL, I, p. 318) A successful poet during the 1790s, Bowles was made the subject of a poem – à la Sheridan – in the Morning Chronicle and the Poems on Various Subjects.46 The letter is similar in tone to the one that Coleridge had written four years earlier to Evans: once again he was much in demand and seeking to impress. His reaction against the Gothic fad so reminiscent of Dibdin’s objections to ‘German tragedies and comedies’,47 or that well-known attack by Wordsworth on ‘frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse’,48 was – in Coleridge’s case at least – an offering less from the heart than from a mind only too aware of the critical prejudice of the times. For the ‘tragedy’ Coleridge submitted to Bowles seven months later49 (Osorio) was clothed with the very garments that he had claimed to be so ‘weary’ of in the novels of Mathew Lewis (The Monk, 1796), Ann Radcliffe (The Italian, 1797) and Mary Robinson (Hubert de Sevrac, 1796). There are dungeon scenes in all five acts, with the climatic final scene of the final act itself taking place in one beneath prince Osorio’s family castle. The play features a number of ‘solitary Houses’, though not exactly ‘by the Sea Side’ they are in equivalent locations of

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picturesque fragility: Ferdinand’s, ‘which stands under the brow of a slate rock’; and Albert’s, ‘opposite’ a ‘puny cataract’ (PW (CC), III, pp. 80, 87). It is a presentation heavily influenced by eighteenth-century Gothic aesthetics, especially of the type Burke espoused in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful where ‘beauty . . . carries with it an idea of weakness and imperfection’.50 From the first scene that has Maria strolling distractedly along the ‘sea . . . coast of Granada’, to the last in which she ‘kneels . . . wild with affright’ before Osorio’s executioners, the beautiful damsel in the play does little more than assume position after position of distress. Alhadra strikes this pose of Burkean ‘beauty’ as well at the beginning of act five, where overtaken by grief at the loss of Ferdinand she wanders aimlessly along a ‘Sea shore’ of ‘dashing Billows’ and ‘hanging woods’.51 Her husband was murdered in ‘A cavern’, a scene dripping with horror and mystery: FERDINAND Call him that fears his fellow-men a coward – I fear not man. – But this inhuman Cavern It were too bad a prison-house for Goblins. Besides (you’ll laugh, my Lord!) but true it is, My last night’s sleep was very sorely haunted By what had pass’d between us in the morning. I saw you in a thousand hideous ways, And doz’d and started, doz’d again and started. I do entreat your Lordship to believe me, In my last dream – OSORIO Well? FERDINAND I was in the act Of falling down that Chasm, when Alhadra Wak’d me – she heard my heart beat! (PW (CC), III, p. 115) The ‘dream’ proves prophetic both of the murderer’s identity and of the way Ferdinand would die. Gothic atmospherics aside, no less significant are the professions of fidelity and the references (here and elsewhere) to ‘Wife’ and ‘Babes’ by Osorio’s lackey; for they serve to keep in mind what the tragic protagonist would eventually realize – his own unsalvageable criminality: OSORIO Nearer, and nearer! and I cannot sir! Will no one hear these stifled groans, and wake me? He would have died to save me, and I kill’d him – A Husband and a Father! (PW (CC), III, p. 145)

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In terms of ‘extraordinary characters’, besides Albert, a prince habituated to ‘picking weeds . . . in the moonlight’ (PW (CC), III, p. 86), there is also a ‘pretty Boy’, a wild child-turned-scholar-turned-adventurer of whom ‘’tis supposed’ that he finally ‘liv’d and died among . . . Savage Men’ (PW (CC), III, pp. 121–123). What Coleridge did admit to Bowles about his ‘tragedy’ was the involvement of ‘Siddons and Kemble’. At that point his play was completely unwritten, indeed, as he freely acknowledged, he did not even have a coherent plan in place. That he should decide so early on and so definitely to pitch his work toward Siddons and Kemble illustrates the cultural cachet of theatre stars. Many plays failed because of unsuitably cast dramatis personae, many held the boards because they had the support of a popular actor or actress.52 The younger George Colman’s The Iron Chest – one of the 120 plays which Elizabeth Inchbald reprinted for her seminal anthology of British Theatre, a play that Jonathan Wordsworth praises ‘as among the best . . . of the Romantic period’53 – ran for only four nights when it was first performed by the Drury Lane theatre company in March 1796. Colman himself had no doubts as to its value; the 20-page preface accompanying the July 1796 version of The Iron Chest was to put the blame (in great detail and with still greater intemperance) squarely on Kemble’s portrayal of Sir Edward Mortimer (the main character): For the most part, he toil’d on, line after line, in a dull torrent of undiversified sound, which stole upon the ear far more drowsily than the distant murmurings of Lethe; with no attempt to break the lulling stream, or check its sleep-inviting course. Frogs in a marsh, flies in a bottle, wind in a crevice, a preacher in the field, the drone of a bagpipe, all, all yielded to the inimitable, and soporific monotony of Mr. KEMBLE!54 The play was re-staged in August at another London theatre, the Haymarket, where it met with popular favour for many seasons (London Stage, V, p. 1779). Of related interest is Richard Cumberland’s The Wheel of Fortune. It too managed to earn a place in Inchbald’s path-breaking anthology, despite her displeasure at the insipidity of its women. She wrote, ‘his gallantry ought to have furnished a lady with a little more to say in the scenes, where she is concerned, and it would have increased the interest of his play’ (BT, XVIII, p. 4). The Wheel of Fortune was likewise first acted at Drury Lane, but unlike The Iron Chest it enjoyed a blockbusting run of 18 nights making it in 1795 the most successful new play since The School for Scandal.55 It was re-shown seven times the following season, seven again in the next, with the Morning Chronicle of 30 September 1796 marvelling at the peculiar fitness of ‘the character of Penruddock, in The Wheel of Fortune’ to Kemble’s style and temperament:

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Even those very defects, which form a drawback upon his general acting, in this character operate in his favour . . . The gloom and rigidity of his features, his hoarse and hollow tones, and his vehement and laboured voice, stamp, as it were, originality upon the part, and give weight to the sentiments and emphasis to the feelings of the recluse and empassioned Misanthrope . . . It was a performance that would be commemorated for decades in the writings of Inchbald, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, James Boaden, Michael Kelly and many others. This is the protagonist of Coleridge’s ‘tragedy’ referring to himself in the aptly distancing third person: OSORIO He was a man different from other Men, And he despised them, yet rever’d himself . . . Nature had made him for some other planet, And press’d his soul into a human shape By accident or malice. In this World He found no fit Companion! (PW (CC), III, p. 117) Osorio’s self-portrait is the very echo of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s in Les Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire, where the philosopher of the French Enlightenment lamented having ‘neither relative, friend, or brother . . . on the earth . . . as if . . . fallen into some unknown planet’.56 The controversial Du Contrat Social and the Émile, ou de L`éducation, had so scandalized the magistracy and the priesthood that Rousseau was doomed to the life of a fugitive. Though he died in 1778, his influence most certainly did not perish with him. The ESTC records nine publications by Rousseau in the 1770s, 14 in the 1780s, and a still greater 18 in the 1790s. Rêveries, which was first translated into English in 1783, reached two further editions during the 1790s under George Robinson – the same London bookseller who brought out the 1796 and 1797 editions of Coleridge’s Poems. If there is a common thread running through the popularity of Rousseau’s personal memoirs, the configuration of Osorio’s lonely lamentation and the acclaim meeting Kemble’s Penruddock, it has to be the obsession of the early Romantics with misanthropes. There is a misanthrope in each of the three novels that Coleridge read for the Critical Review. The type appears in the poems he was writing at the time, most unforgettably in ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Mariner’. Wordsworth was depicting similar social castaways in poetry (‘The Female Vagrant’, ‘Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree’, etc.); in fact, his closest associate also wrote a play in 1797 (The Borderers) that featured ‘this Rivers’ whom ‘Nobody loves’.57 The status of the solitary melancholic can be broadly associated with the elevation

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after the French revolution of Shakespeare, particularly of Shakespearean tragedy. The originals behind Coleridge’s dramatic ‘production’ include – by his own admission: ‘The four most popular Tragedies of Shakespeare (Lear, Othello, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet)’ (CL, I, p. 304). Romeo and Juliet are ostracized because of their love for each other, Hamlet by grief; Othello is a ‘thick-lips’ Moor among the ‘fair’ of Venice, Lear a king turned mad old vagrant; even a cursory familiarity with these plays will make obvious this bias towards outcasts, in Shakespeare and the society that valued him. Coleridge’s statement about the ‘four most popular Tragedies of Shakespeare’ is, however, inaccurate. While he was most certainly correct on the popularity of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet (the latter being the third most frequently acted Shakespearean tragedy in London between 1776 and 1800),58 his two other choices were really more discussed and written about than actually performed for the box office. At the new Drury Lane, King Lear provided but a single night’s entertainment during the whole of the 1790s. What he should have mentioned, of course, is Macbeth. By the time Coleridge gave this list (on 6 February 1797), Macbeth would have completed a total of 27 nights at the new theatre house making it the most frequently acted Shakespeare play there by 16 performances. And no wonder; deprived first of friends, then family, beset by a veritable forest of enemies in an increasingly hopeless and loveless situation, its protagonist emerges as the very archetype of the ‘empassioned Misanthrope’: MACBETH I have liv’d long enough: my way of life Is fallen into the sear, the yellow leaf: And that which should accompany old age, As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, I must not look to have; but, in their stead, Curses, not loud, but deep, mouth-honour, breath, Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.59 Like Penruddock, Macbeth is a melancholic brooder brimming with vehement passions – now despairing, later rising to an almost triumphal belligerence – in other words, yet another ‘perfect’ role for Kemble (as these paroxysms of pleasure from the Monthly Mirror attest): If Kemble ever approached excellence in his acting, or if there was ever a performance which merited to be called perfect, it was on this evening; not in certain passages, or certain scenes only, but from the beginning to the end of the character of Macbeth. We pronounce it here, generally, to be the FINEST SPECIMEN OF THE HISTRIONIC ART, which we remember to have beheld . . .60

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Is it any surprise then, given the nature of Kemble’s successes, given the national predilection that the lead of Coleridge’s ‘tragedy’ is a misanthrope marked by extreme emotionalism? Maria refuses to marry Osorio, the protagonist in question, for she fears he must be either mad or guilty of some terrible crime: Yes! it is truth. Saw you his countenance? How rage, remorse, and scorn, and stupid fear, Displac’d each other with swift interchanges? If this were all assum’d, as you believe, He must needs be a most consummate Actor; And hath so vast a power to deceive me, I never could be safe. And why assume The semblance of such execrable feelings? (PW (CC), III, p. 124) This portrait would have been, unmistakably, a nod to Kemble’s acting prowess (and not untypical of Coleridge if we remember his obsequiousness with the sonnets to ‘SIDDONS’ and ‘SHERIDAN’). Osorio was wracked by these ‘execrable feelings’ because Penruddock had made it so clear, even to Inchbald more than a decade later, that ‘Kemble cannot love moderately – sighs, soft complainings, a plaintive voice, and tender looks, bespeak mere moderation – he must be struck to the heart’s core, or not at all: – he must be wounded to the soul with grief, despair, or madness’ (BT, XVIII, p. 4). Osorio never does any night-time courting; the character is, furthermore, as ruthless, as alarmingly unstable in love as Macbeth in the pursuit of power: OSORIO With timid lip, he takes the Lover’s place, He takes his place, for certain! Dusky rogue, Were it not sport to whimper with thy mistress, Then steal away and roll upon my Grave, Till thy sides shook with laughter? Blood! blood! blood! They want thy blood! thy blood, Osorio! (PW (CC), III, p. 111) MACBETH It will have blood; – they say, blood will have blood: Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak; Augurs, that understand relations, have By maggot-pies, and choughs, and rooks, brought forth The secret’st man of blood.61 Macbeth has just murdered the king; Osorio will soon kill his most loyal servant.

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Having dealt with Kemble at length, it is about time we enquired into what Coleridge might have had in mind for Siddons. Let us begin with the passage below from the most prominent female role in Osorio, Alhadra: My infant quarrelling with the coarse hard bread Brought daily: for the little wretch was sickly, My rage had dried away its natural food . . . I should scarce dare to tell you, that it’s noises And peevish cries so fretted on my brain, That I have struck the innocent babe in anger! (PW (CC), III, p. 72) She is relating one of the many convict experiences in the play, whose political trenchancy relies on the awareness of the appalling conditions of the nation’s jails. Like the dungeons of medieval Spain, there were no provisions whatsoever for nursing mothers in the prisons of eighteenth-century England. The ‘infant’ does not survive. In act four, she suffers the loss as well of her husband (Ferdinand). It is the last straw leading her to precipitate a rebellion so successful that by the end of act five the ‘Morescoe Woman’ (PW (CC), III, p. 65) would have the entire future of the Spanish ruling hierarchy begging at her feet. The story of Alhadra is a variation on English radicalism’s leitmotif for the 1790s, which is of the poor and the downtrodden avenging their ‘misery’ with retributive force on the rich and powerful.62 ‘Religious Musings’, longest of the 1797 Poems, by S. T. Coleridge prophesizes, O thou poor Widow, who in dreams dost view Thy Husband’s mangled corse, and from short doze Start’st with a shriek: or in thy half-thatch’d cot Wak’d by the wintry night-storm, wet and cold, Cowr’st o’er thy screaming baby! Rest awhile, Children of Wretchedness! The hour is nigh: And lo! the Great, the Rich, the Mighty Men, The Kings and the Chief Captains of the World, With all that fix’d on high like stars of Heaven Shot baleful influence, shall be cast to earth, Vile and down-trodden, as the untimely fruit Shook from the fig-tree by a sudden storm. Ev’n now the storm begins . . .63 These millenarian visions of his, as the ‘Note to Line 320’ indicates, owed much ‘to the French Revolution’: especially to the fall of civil and religious institutions all across Europe.64 Clearly, Alhadra has far ‘more to say’ and far more to do ‘in the scenes’ than the ‘lady’ in Richard Cumberland’s The Wheel of Fortune. As with Osorio, the

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character combines late eighteenth-century sentimentality with Macbeth. The baby-hitting, man-killing mother whose breasts run dry from rage is the hardened woman apotheosized by Lady Macbeth. Coleridge’s creation is an astute one for an age not only in love with Siddons’s Lady Macbeth, but enamoured in general with spectacles of female fury. Figure 4.1 exhibits Siddons in another popular role, ‘as EUPHRASIA’ The Grecian Daughter who frees the country by stabbing its tyrannical ruler to death. The caption – ‘A Woman’s vengeance tow’rs above her Sex’ – is a quote from the final scene right after she deals the fatal stroke.65 As with the obsession with misanthropic men, the prominence of manly women may be explained historically: something perhaps to do with an actress whose ‘action . . . possesses’ (as one critic put it in 1795) ‘rather too much of the masculine’ and ‘not one particle’ in the way ‘of humour . . . gaiety and ease’.66 That these characters take violent action against men cannot, surely, be completely unconnected with the anxiety felt during the 1790s over the real involvement of women in politics and warfare? Apart from the literary efforts of Mary Wollstonecraft, Helen Maria Williams and others, to show how women could be like men, at the other end of the political spectrum, there were the pro-government contributors to the Anti-Jacobin with stories of female revolutionaries involved in acts of mutilation upon the bodies of their enemies. [Women] advocates of Democracy in this country, though they have had no opportunity of imitating the French ladies, in their atrocious acts of cruelty; have yet assumed a stern serenity in the contemplation of those savage excesses. ‘To express their abhorrence of royalty, they (the French ladies) threw away the character of their sex, and bit the amputated limbs of their murdered countrymen . . . I am sorry to add, that the relation, accompanied with looks of horror and disgust, only provoked a contemptuous smile from an illuminated British fair-one.’ See Robinson – p. 251. The above quotation is taken from the footnote to line 36 of Richard Polwhele’s 206-line poetical attack on the followers of Wollstonecraft: The Unsex’d Females of 1798.67 Lady Macbeth, Euphrasia, Alhadra – these dagger-wielding women who assassinate rulers – are visually, as much as they are ideologically, antitheses of Britannia (seated, serene, armed with a spear and a shield); they are her dark sisters made relevant by the drive for political change during a time of war.68 The critical prejudice against Gothic novels is perhaps another manifestation of this misogynistic anxiety over the rise of women as a political force. Women produced most of the runaway successes, which is none too surprising considering that they were also the main consumers of the genre. Despite the undeniable importance of women to the literary marketplace, it is highly unlikely that these ‘frantic novels’ were ever a threat as Wordsworth alleged to ‘the works of Shakespear and Milton’.69 An examination of the books they wrote would find them similarly reverential towards the same wholly male canon, like The Italian, by Radcliffe, where there is an epigraph from Shakespeare in every chapter.

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Figure 4.1 Mrs. Siddons as Euphrasia, 1797 (engraving) by De Wilde. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved (2304.c).

Coleridge read The Italian just before writing Osorio, and it is a work that once again demonstrates the overriding influence of Macbeth. This is evident in the villainess, the Marchesa di Vivaldi, who in the vein of Lady Macbeth wants her ‘woman’s weakness’ removed in order to commit murder.70 And, in the ninth chapter of second volume, which follows Macbeth’s killing of Duncan so closely that we can detect in Schedoni’s extreme nervousness shades of the Shakespearean original: At the foot of the stair-case, he again stopped to listen. ‘Do you hear any thing?’ said he in a whisper. ‘I hear only the sea,’ replied the man. ‘Hush! it is something more!’ said Schedoni; ‘that is the murmur of voices!’ They were silent. After a pause of some length, ‘It is, perhaps, the voice of the spectres I told you of, Signor,’ said Spalatro, with a sneer. ‘Give me the dagger,’ said Schedoni.71 In Schedoni, we have another misanthropic nobleman driven by ‘pride’ and ‘ambition’ towards the most unscrupulous deeds.72 For the children of the

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Enlightenment, whose Protestant sensibilities were offended by the use of the Supernatural in Shakespeare, Radcliffe invented an interesting compromise: equivalent situations (shadowy figures who appear and disappear at will, disembodied voices, a blood-stained hand hovering in mid-air, etc.) created by perfectly logical circumstances (secret passages, or concealed rooms, or the imaginings of an unstable mind). As a strategy it came to be widely employed by the novelists of the 1790s.73 The Morning Chronicle, 30 September 1797: If the character of an age is to be estimated by the Comedies it produces, the present will appear in a very singular light. Posterity will imagine that all our conversation was carried on in puns, and that the whole business of human life was to stumble over chairs, and break china! There is no danger we will make this mistake, indeed, as an idea it remains preposterous enough for us to overlook the point altogether. With war abroad and political activism on the rise at home, the end of the eighteenth century was not so much a comical time as a time desperate for comic relief. As Figure 4.2

Playwright

Title*

Genre**

Performances**

Sheridan, R. B.

The School for Scandal

Comedy

261

Gay, John

The Beggar’s Opera

Ballad Opera

229

Bickerstaff, I.

Love in a Village

Comic Opera

168

Sheridan, R. B.

The Duenna

Comic Opera

164

Shakespeare, W.

Hamlet

Tragedy

164

Colman, George

Inkle and Yarico

Comic Opera

164

Shakespeare, W.

Macbeth

Tragedy

150

Colman, George

The Spanish Barber

Comedy

142

Shakespeare, W.

The Merchant of Venice

Comedy

119

Shakespeare, W.

Romeo and Juliet

Tragedy

119

Cowley, Hannah

The Belle’s Strategem

Comedy

118

Cobb, James

The Haunted Tower

Comic Opera

112

*I have italicized the plays that were written after 1750. **Based on London Stage, V, pp. clxxi–clxxii.

Figure 4.2 ‘The most frequently acted mainpieces in London between 1776 and 1800’, 1968 (statistics) by Charles Beecher Hogan for The London Stage 1660–1800, 5 vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1968), V, pp. clxxi–clxxii.

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shows, the less serious genres accounted for eight of the twelve plays in London that accumulated 112 performances or more between 1776 and 1800. Yet comedy (especially musical comedy) elicited far less attention than tragedy in the books and newspapers of the period. Despite the popular favour enjoyed by the leading comedians, we find a few of them like ‘Mr. Bannister, junr.’ professing ‘his natural powers’ supposedly ‘better adapted to the performance of tragic parts’.74 The plays Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth decided to write were all tragedies. Never mind that it had been almost 20 years since anyone wrote a successful tragedy in verse for the stage,75 never mind that Romantic tragedy at Drury Lane was experiencing an average lifespan of just two performances.76 All these men ever saw was the Apollonian prominence of Shakespeare whose brilliance they felt they had to try in their several ways to touch, never mind how treacherous the ground. William Henry Ireland attempted to prove his own genius by creating an entirely new Shakespeare play, Vortigern, an Historical Tragedy, which was acted on 2 April 1796 at Drury Lane theatre where it bombed.77 It was, according to the Times newspaper, a fraud all the more obvious for its ‘strong similitude to Macbeth’: [Here] is a Duncan murdered, a Malcolm flies, a Siward comes to fight for him: – let England and Scotland change places, and the likeness is complete; so that it appears the skeleton of that masterpiece, which the great God of Poetry [Shakespeare] has cloathed with nerves and muscles, breathed into it the ætherial flud, and warmed it with Promethean fire.78 The wings of his imagination had taken him a little too close. As for Osorio, it did not even reach the boards of Drury Lane: it was rejected over the autumn of 1797 after a few deprecatory ‘remarks’ from Kemble.79

4.2 ‘One Classic Drama, and Reform the Stage’ After excoriating on for about 500 words or so upon the Assignation – a two-act operatic farce that had its first and only representation at Drury Lane in December 1812 – The Times newspaper was moved to end its review with the following declaration: In this country, where literature is the natural pursuit of loftier minds, such men must be found, and such men must write Dramas; but such are not the disastrous fabricators that mangle the struggling things that come before us in agonies, – born and dead in the same hour. The fault must lie in the conduct of the Theatres; and now that a hope of better general management is given, it should be the first among the reforms. It cannot be difficult to devise some expedient by which the men, of whom we have spoken, might be

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induced to contribute their exertions without the necessity of submitting to compliances unworthy of the rank in which they should hold themselves, and be held by those to whom their exertions are life, station, and fame.80 Whether Whig or Tory, it was de rigueur among the literati to deplore the state of the English stage. Unlike much of the earlier criticism however, there is no reference here to the over-commodious extent of the establishment or to the predisposition of its programme towards broad effect or mere spectacle. Henry Holland’s playhouse had been completely destroyed by fire and the replacement that showed the Assignation was very different. ‘The Form or Shape of the Theatre’, according to the new architect’s Observations for the Design for the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane (1813), was ‘connected with the primary objects of DISTINCT SOUND and VISION’.81 A reduction in the size of the theatre had been the most obvious step to take, and in terms of seating capacity the new auditorium certainly seems considerably smaller. Walley Chamberlain Oulton thought ‘2810 persons may be accommodated’, which was nearly 30 per cent down on the estimate he gave in 1796 for the predecessor (3,611). Its circular shape also supposedly had ‘the effect of making the spectator imagine himself nearly close upon the stage, though seated in a centre box’. On the acoustics, he was equally impressed. ‘The space over the side boxes, and ranging with the upper gallery is left entirely open; hence the more perfect transmission of sound to the remotest parts of the house, where the lowest whisper may be distinctly heard.’82 Indeed, concerning the attainment of these two ‘primary objects’, the major London dailies had nothing but praise as well for this latest incarnation of Drury Lane.83 The ‘general management’ was different, with Samuel Whitbread replacing Sheridan at the helm. Unlike Sheridan who had bemired the company in debt, Whitbread was to complete the playhouse on schedule and thousands of pounds within budget. Furthermore, in line with the prevailing critical mood, Whitbread wanted to encourage the traditional genres of tragedy and comedy.84 The popular satire on English Bards by Lord Byron, a fellow Whig, had seen nothing but ‘degradation’ in the preoccupation of Sheridan’s Drury Lane with the extravagant melodramas and pantomimes of ‘CHERRY, SKEFFINGTON, and Mother GOOSE’. With ‘Drama’ still allegedly in a ‘motley’ state, the poem echoed the solution of The Times: Heavens! is all sense of shame, and talent gone? Have we no living Bard of merit? – none? Awake, GEORGE COLMAN, CUMBERLAND, awake! Ring the alarum bell, let folly quake! Oh! SHERIDAN! if aught can move thy pen . . . Give as thy last memorial to the age, One classic drama, and reform the stage.85

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Would one ‘classic drama’ by a ‘living Bard’ have really transformed the theatrical world? Probably not, but given the topicality of this issue involving such a writer would have clearly represented another significant coup for the ‘management’. Remorse was to première at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane on 23 January 1813. It was to be, for many years, the first five-act ‘production’ by a writer of acknowledged literary merit – a fact that excited no small attention in the press, particularly from the Whig quarter: DUNCES have so long kept exclusive possession of the stage, and by a sort of intelligent consciousness rather inconsistent with their general want of apprehension, are so unanimous in their praise and support of each other, that we almost despaired to see a man of genius step forward to dispute their (from its long existence) almost sacred title . . . Mr. COLERIDGE, whose poetic talents are undisputed, though they are deformed by sentimentalities, and whines, and infant lispings, has, it appears, hardened by the public ordeal which he has for some years undergone, manfully disregarded the pelting scorn of many a critic, and now ventures to lay his claims before a mixed multitude.86 There is an element of self-reproach here; the Whigs were precisely the ones who had been Coleridge’s most vociferous critics, with the periodical quoted above (The Examiner) having chastized him in an earlier issue for being a lapdog to the Tory government.87 The turnaround being effected here is indicative of a time when the reformers wanted his play to succeed. The Morning Chronicle, a Whig publication, was the first newspaper to advertise the play (on 5 December 1812); on 20 January 1813, three days before the première, it also gave this flattering notice: Remorse, which is forthcoming at Drury-lane Theatre, is understood to be the production of Mr. COLERIDGE, a gentleman of high talents and attainments, and who, whatever the work may prove, will certainly have the merit of being original in his conceptions and energetic in his language.88 Written in blank verse, steeped in Shakespeare, Rousseau and the politics of the French Revolution – Remorse would have appealed, taking into account the prerogatives of his culture and Whitbread’s credentials as the leader of the Opposition.89 The work possessed the spectacular supernaturalism and the fight scenes to attract the lower orders, which were necessary to fill the galleries. Additionally, it had a Spanish setting to take advantage of the national interest in an allied country against the forces of Napoleon.90 Spain, violence, magic – Drury Lane Theatre publicized the lot (see Figure 4.3). The company was unusually fulsome on the world of the performance,

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unusually detailed in the accreditation of particular scenes and specific pieces of scenery;91 the courtesies extended to Coleridge offer a striking contrast to the billing that was typically given, for example, to Charles Robert Maturin’s Bertram (see Figure 4.4). As the first major new performance in Whitbread’s rebuilt theatre, the Whigs had every incentive to help the play along. The Chronicle must have been put at Coleridge’s disposal for its evaluation of the production is almost identical to the Courier’s – the following was carried word-for-word in both newspapers: SHAKESPEARE alone gives the substance of tragedy, and expresses the very soul of the passions, while all other writers convey only a general description or shadowy outline of them – that his is the real text of nature, and the rest but paraphrases and commentaries on it, rhetorical, poetical, and sentimental. If Mr. COLERIDGE has not been able to break the spell, and to penetrate the inmost circle of the heart, he has approached nearer than almost any other writer, and has produced a very beautiful representation of human

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nature, which will vie with the best and most popular of our sentimental dramas.92 ‘Newspaper Calumny’ was one obstacle to the success of Remorse that the Whig management helped Coleridge to circumvent. The other was the ‘ancient custom and privilege possessed’ by the British playgoer ‘of damning a new play on its first night’.93 This was evaded by inviting ‘predetermined Plauditors’ who were, as Coleridge himself observed, so anxious for its acceptance that they ‘gave a treble chear [sic] of Claps’ upon his ‘entering the Box on Saturday Night’ (CL, III, pp. 430–431). Their ‘unanimous and unbounded approbation’ (see Figure 4.5), which repeatedly interrupted the performance,94 was to become a potent tactic for advancing the play in that it was repeatedly advertised by the playbills and reviews of the day. As the Chronicle and Courier had both reported, Remorse ‘was received throughout with marks of the deepest

Figure 4.4 Theatre Royal, Drury Lane . . . Bertram, 9 May 1816 (Playbill). © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved (Playbills.46–76, 127–133).

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attention, and reiterated bursts of applause, and announced for a second representation amidst the acclamations of the audience’.95 The impact of this arrangement between a Whig and a Tory newspaper to promote the play would have been considerable. As reviewers often followed each other’s lead along party lines, it was effectively guaranteed a positive reception by the press on both sides of the political divide. Of the newspapers that bucked the general celebratory tone, The Times went the furthest in suggesting – as Coleridge furiously reported to Southey – ‘they were force[d] to affect [an] admiration of the Tragedy’ (CL, III, p. 433: 9 February 1813). The word-for-word correspondences that exist between many of the more laudatory reviews (of which The Morning Chronicle and The Courier provided only the most obvious instances) suggest the circulation of a master text. This was as much the assumption of The Satirist, another publication that chose to break ranks with the other newspapers:

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Mr. Coleridge . . . dare[s] not trust his fame to unbiased criticism; but practices the delusions of passing sentence upon himself, in every channel (and they are very numerous) to which he has access. This is a meanness unworthy a bard of Mr. Coleridge’s acknowledged abilities . . .96 Much of what ‘appeared on Monday the 25th’ in the Chronicle and the Courier was almost certainly, to stay with the Satirist, ‘the author’s . . . own critique on his own tragedy’.97 For the commentary provided by these two newspapers make a better match with the opinions Coleridge expressed in private, than with the facts of the 1813 production. It is odd, for example, for the newspapers to devote their most extensive analyses to Ordonio when the largest part (by 77 lines) was Alvar.98 There is a similar misalignment with the female characters: Alhadra being the recipient of a more generous coverage when Teresa was clearly the more substantial role. There are two reasons why these incongruities might have arisen and they both implicate Coleridge as the source. It was he who thought that ‘every Ray in the Tragedy converges’ on Ordonio (CL, III, p. 434). Perhaps he still had the original 1797 Osorio in mind, when the Ordonio character (which originally went by the name of Osorio) was more important than the Alvar character (originally called Albert). This would also explain why more attention was given to Alhadra, who was initially the principal female character. Alternatively, it was not a mistake at all but a deliberate attempt by him to assert his original conception of the play. For Coleridge was dissatisfied with the changes he brought to it in 1812, which were actually forced on him against his better judgement: I find the alterations & alterations rather a tedious business, & I am sure, could compose a new act more easily & in shorter Time than add a single Speech of ten lines. – The Managers are more sanguine far than I am: & the actors & actresses with exception of Miss Smith are pleased & gratified with their Parts. And truly Miss Smith’s Part is not appropriate to her Talents, in kind at least – & I am labouring with much vexation & little success to make it better. She was offered a part that would have suited her admirably, but (I know not from what motive) refused it.99 Sarah Smith performed Teresa, leaving Alhadra, the only other female character in Remorse, as the ‘part’ she turned down. Coleridge would have preferred her to remain with the ‘Moresco woman’ because of her acting style, which was heavily reminiscent of Siddons, for whom he had from the very beginning designed the role. The praise lavished upon Siddons for ‘the great and awful in character’100 would have just as aptly been applied to Smith, who, ‘in the expression of the less amiable passions, of the more violent emotions of hatred, jealousy, and revenge: in the representation, of woe-worn misanthropy, or comfortless despair . . . excels herself and electrifies the audience’.101 She too was

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supposedly lacking in femininity, on the acting of Teresa, even Coleridge’s newspaper conceded that ‘her forte does not consist in delineating the tender griefs of a love-sick girl’.102 These traits predisposed Smith towards the same female fury characters, as in Isabella of Thomas Southerne, chosen for her inaugural appearance at the new theatre, where ‘a gentle, timid, and enduring woman, is suddenly transformed into a giddy murderess . . . with a dagger in her hand’.103 Despite such ‘eminent qualifications for the striking display of the vehement passions of the soul’,104 the Chronicle has the actress turning down at least one more vituperative female role: Green-room report says that Miss SMITH refused the part of the Queen [in Richard III], as not great enough forsooth for her superior talents, although Mrs. SIDDONS, Mrs. POPE, Mrs. CRAUFORD and others felt it to their honour to display their powers in the character. In the present case the absence of Miss SMITH was not a misfortune, for Mrs. GLOVER gave to the fine scene with her children, a force and a feeling that drew from the audience the most sympathetic testimonies of applause.105 The ‘fine scene’ performed at Whitbread’s Drury Lane was not Shakespeare’s, but Colley Cibber’s. In Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth had been prevented altogether from meeting the young princes in the tower. It was Cibber who allowed the rendezvous in act four scene one, shrewdly deferring ‘the king’s commands’ that disbar her to the end, and thereby enabling the family to be separated with greater pathos. A ‘LIEUTENANT, with a Warrant’ suddenly arrives on scene for the queen, and the little Duke of York pleads, ‘Won’t you take me with you, mother? I shall be so ’fraid to stay when you are gone’ – all in vain, of course, as they are forced to part ‘severally’ with cries of ‘Oh, mother, mother’ and ‘my poor children’ (BT, I, pp. 51–52). The affective ‘force’ of Queen Elizabeth, like Alhadra, owes much to her motherhood. Perhaps these characters were just too close to heart for a woman facing the possibility of life as a spinster,106 for whom stage and real life could be conflated in the press with extraordinary cruelty. Observing ‘Miss Smith’ in Remorse, The Theatrical Inquisitor detects ‘on her features the character of distressed old maidism; the most unfortunate expression of which the countenance of a female is susceptible’.107 Her portfolio during the new theatre’s opening season was indeed conspicuously lacking in mother figures, being committed instead to the famous young heroines of Thomas Otway, Nicholas Rowe and Shakespeare.108 For ‘Smith’s Part’ to be ‘appropriate to her Talents’, a role initially written for an ingénue had to become (in the jargon of ‘the stage’) a leading lady. Coleridge added 92 lines of dialogue to the ‘betrothed maid’, a 50 per cent increase for the character.109 A large part of these ‘alterations’ takes place in the third act,

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where she is no longer the passive recipient of the designs of the rival princes. Teresa’s protests at the elder brother’s ‘dark Provoking of the Hidden Powers’ are more forceful; she now breaks off from the scene altogether leaving him ashamed and much perturbed.110 Moreover, because she does not faint like the original, she is able to participate in the post-conjuration tête-à-tête that follows between the younger brother and his father.111 Forty of lines are gained on the 1797 version here; fulfilling the requirements of ‘Smith’s Part’ imposed on Coleridge a new model – Romeo and Juliet. JULIET Oh, break, my heart! – poor bankrupt, break at once! To prison, eyes! ne’er look on liberty; Vile earth to earth resign; end motion here, And thou and Romeo press one heavy brier! (BT, I, p. 44) The supposed death of the lover, and the fatalism that it engenders in Juliet, are replicated with Teresa: TERESA Is Alvar dead? what then? The nuptial rites and funeral shall be one! Here’s no abiding place for thee, Teresa. – Away! they see me not – Thou seest me, Alvar!112 Coleridge’s ‘alterations’ fall heavily as well on the fifth act, where Shakespeare is again imitated. The imagery evoked by the heroine is prophetic in both plays: Juliet is re-united with Romeo in a tomb; Teresa with Alvar in an underground dungeon she fears will be her ‘death-bed’ and ‘burial vault’.113 The stage action involved in this final reunion – the slow, torturous recovery of the heroine, and the recognition of her long-lost love, which causes her to throw herself into his arms114 – is similar enough so that the following description of Smith’s Juliet can be used to help us visualize how the same actress would have played Teresa’s finest moment in Remorse: Miss SMITH gave here a fine evidence of her attention to nature. After the first effort by which she escaped from the immediate horrors of the sepulchre, she sunk into almost total exhaustion, – she heaved sighs, and struggled for air with the faint and sickly convulsion that borders so close on death; and when at length her recovery advanced, it was clouded and slow, her eye wandered without an object, her head hung, and with some distant memory of the voice which recalled her, she seemed still unable to collect its tones. When at the close, she flung herself into the arms of her lover, she did it with

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the wild and hurried eagerness of one who felt that it was to be the last effort of her dying powers. The applause for this was as might be presumed, loud and universal.115 A comparison between the 1797 and 1813 versions of the play will show Alhadra and Alvar to be the result also of considerable revision. The ‘part’ that Smith ‘refused’ went to Julia Glover, who, in terms of pay, held sixth-place at the theatre company.116 This assignment of the ‘Moresco woman’ to a lesser actress accompanied a further 35 per cent loss to the character’s dialogue, from 250 lines down to 163 (barely half the amount of Teresa). Alvar, on the other hand, when compared to Albert, registers an increase in excess of 40 per cent.117 It is a change that matches the player. Robert William Elliston, who was the company’s highest paid actor, performed Alvar. As ‘the best lover on the stage’, he would have benefited from the addition of an introductory scene that largely devoted him to similar flights of passion as the following: There Teresa met me The morning of the day of my departure. ... There seem’d a glory round us, and Teresa The angel of the vision! (then with agitation. Had’st thou seen How in each motion her most innocent soul, Beam’d forth and brighten’d, thou thyself would’st tell me, Guilt is a thing impossible in her! She must be innocent!118 He had nearly 90 lines here, which precede the 50 more his character would gain through the fifth-act reunion with Teresa, where the distresses put up by the female lead would have been perfectly complemented by the emotions that he could bring to his face: In this quick variety of conception, which requires as quick and various an expression, his management of features not naturally good is astonishing. Sorrows and joys, regret and indulged memory, despair and hope, love and hatred, the collectedness of reason and the scatter of insanity, rush over his features with alternate mastery: . . . I consider MR. ELLISTON . . . the greatest actor of the present day.119 Privately, however, Coleridge trashed virtually every aspect of the 1813 production. The letter to Thomas Poole in February speaks of ‘bad Scenes,

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execrable Acting, & Newspaper Calumny’ (CL, III, p. 436). In fact, the actor who deucedly displeased the author was Elliston: Poor Rae (why poor? for Ordonio has almost made his fortune) did the best in his power . . . But Nature has denied him Person, & all volume & depth of Voice – so that the blundering Coxcomb, Elliston, by mere dint of Voice & Self-conceit out-dazzled him – (CL, III, pp. 436–437) At five feet seven, with a voice that made it ‘difficult to distinguish, merely by the tone, between his speeches and those of Mrs. Glover’,120 Alexander Rae, in the character Coleridge had once hoped would be played by Kemble, must have been disillusioning – but Elliston was worse. That ‘Alvar’ seemed to be ‘most miserably performed’ is inferable from the lengthy diatribes of the detracting journals (e.g. The Satirist), and from the allied press, which preferred to ignore him (e.g. The Examiner).121 Elliston probably played the part extempore, on a single reading. ‘Vanity and impatience of legitimate study and regular application’, to quote The Theatrical Inquisitor, ‘are the leading features of his character’.122 So what if he had forgotten a specific line, or a particular action? His prodigious repertoire of stock characters ensured there was always a ready substitute for him ‘to bustle through’ with a ‘grin, and stamp, and roar for the amusement of the rabble’.123 Elliston might well have ‘powers, that properly cultivated . . . render him the first ornament of the legitimate drama’,124 unfortunately, already at the peak of his career and widely adored, he had no real incentive to exercise himself for Remorse, a new work by an as yet unknown playwright. ‘Poor Rae’, who ‘did the best in his power’, manifested competence enough at least to salvage a few admiring notices from The Satirist and The Theatrical Inquisitor. It was a similar story on the female side of the fence, with the lead disappointing and the player of secondary importance turning in the stronger performance. According to The Times: Mrs. GLOVER, as a comic actress, exhibits decided talents; but we have long been of [the] opinion, that her strength lies in a superior department, and that as a tragedian, she has but little to fear from any competition. On Saturday, she exhibited some of the most subduing and striking powers of the art, and if the play is to live, she has a most important share in the merit of keeping it in existence.125 Remorse lasted 20 nights earning Coleridge £400, which he calculated to be ‘more than all’ his previous ‘literary Labors put together’ (CL, III, p. 437). We know the play ‘met with great success’,126 but exactly why this happened is unclear. If the production had succeeded because of Glover or Rae – as a

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reading of the unfavourable reviews would suggest – then why, with the same crop of actors, did it fare so badly in the next season that it was removed after just one night?127 Coleridge, on the other hand, would have upheld its conceptual and linguistic properties. Its ‘two best qualities’ are explained to Southey as the ‘Unity of the Plot’, where every scene is attendant upon Ordonio’s developing moral crisis, and ‘the variety of metres’ by which he insisted it is distinguishable whether ‘the Speeches [of the characters] are merely transitive; or narrative; or passionate; or (as in the Incantation) deliberate & formal Poetry’ (CL, III, pp. 433–434)! We need only note the timelessness implicit in Coleridge’s appeal to intrinsic aesthetic qualities (the first propounded by Aristotle, the second, associated with the blank verse of Shakespeare) that fails once more to explain its manifest timeliness. The third possibility, which treats the play not as ‘classic drama’ but as part of a fad,128 points to the extraordinary cultural machinery that was laid at Coleridge’s disposal. He was given every resource the Drury Lane managers and their friends could muster, including favourable reviews in the major London dailies (bar one, The Times), their top four tragic actors simultaneously (i.e. Elliston, Smith, Rae and Glover), and (as the music director recounted) scenery that was literally spellbinding: The poetry of the incantation . . . was sung by Mrs. Bland, with all that chaste expression and tenderness of feeling which speak at once as it were to the heart. The chorus of boatmen chanting on the water under the convent walls, and the distant peal of the organ, accompanying the monks while singing within the convent chapel, seemed to overcome and soothe the audience; a thrilling sensation appeared to pervade the great mass of congregated humanity, and, during its performance, it was listened to, with undivided attention, as if the minds and hearts of all were riveted and enthralled by the combination presented to their notice; and, at the conclusion, the applause was loud and protracted.129 As the first major new play in the rebuilt theatre, many of the elements contributing to the world of the performance would have been extra novel, extraexciting. Elliston had yet to act with Rae, Drury Lane’s latest acquisition, nor Smith opposite Glover. Not for years had a production been given such a flatteringly detailed playbill, and it is doubtful whether Remorse ever again received the assistance it originally did of an orchestrated audience.

4.3 Forever Coleridge IN the most exposed and perilous station among the ranks of literature stands the dramatist . . . all [are] sensible of the lucky force of stage effect, and the artificial aids of scenic representation. Had the writer of Remorse composed

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his tragedy merely to be read, we hesitate not to pronounce that he would completely have failed in his object . . . [therefore] very far is it from our wish or intention to alloy the thrillings of his self-congratulations. We have, however, a duty to the public to perform, in taking a strict and impartial view of the merits of the piece under consideration; and this is the more imperative, as we are sure that none of our readers, after having seen it performed, have made it the lucubration of their closets, or can charge their memories with any very accurate account of it, however great their resignation and devotion may have been at the time of the exhibition.130 Why it is that we automatically reach for the script in order to appreciate drama, when we do not with film, a near analogous mode of ‘scenic representation’, may perhaps be traced back to this preoccupation during the Romantic period with evaluating plays as ‘literature’. The pre-eminent position assigned (then as now) to a ‘dramatist’ in the literary canon is one contributory factor; so was the disillusionment of its dramaturges with their theatres, which I have documented. Charles Lamb’s argument for treating a play as if it were a literary text, set out in The Reflector, involves both bardolatory and a pejorative view of stagecraft. ‘The contemptible machinery by which they mimic the storm’, he complained, ‘is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be to represent Lear’. According to him, when watching the performance, ‘we see nothing but corporal [sic] infirmities’; whereas, when ‘we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear . . . sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and storms’.131 The body of the actor is supplanted by an imaginary construct from the mind of Lamb. Taken in this sense, another possible reason then for the logo-centric impulse is clearly the way in which such an approach allows the literary critic to prioritize his own reading formations. The central position occupied by the leading actors and actresses with respect to the theatrical occasion is plain in the evidence that survives from the period. Kemble and Siddons inspired Coleridge’s tragedy; their immediate successors, Elliston and Smith, determined the revisions that he had to make in order to stage it at Drury Lane. A reference to the original playbill would reveal the names of the performers down to the bit parts and cameos, but nothing on its authorship, or plot, or even the dramatis personae they were supposed to be performing (see Figure 4.3). Rather than an actor having to get under the ‘skin’ of a favourite character, which Eugene Ionesco would have asked us to resist in the twentieth century,132 for Coleridge, it was the dramatic creation that had to conform to the personality of the stage player. Publicly at least, Elliston’s impromptu improvisations were celebrated for giving ‘the character of ALVAR . . . beauties and striking points’ that ‘delighted’ and ‘surprized’ the author.133 When Smith failed to impress, he blamed himself for foisting on her a role ‘not fully developed, and quite inadequate to her extraordinary

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powers’.134 In the general mindset, it was the performance that constituted the play. A corollary of this was the lionization of the actor’s craft, which Lamb deplored. To quote The Reflector again: It would be an insult to my readers’ understandings to attempt any thing like a criticism on this farrago of false thoughts and nonsense. But the reflection it led me into was a kind of wonder, how, from the days of the actor here celebrated to our own, it should have been the fashion to complement every performer in his turn, that has had the luck to please the town in any of the great characters of Shakespeare, with the notion of possessing a mind congenial with the poet’s . . . To know the internal workings and movements of a great mind, of an Othello or a Hamlet for instance, the when and the why and the how far they should be moved; to what pitch a passion is becoming; to give the reins and to pull in the curb exactly at the moment when the drawing in or the slackening is most graceful; seems to demand a reach of intellect of a vastly different extent from that which is employed upon the bare imitation of the signs of these passions in the countenance or gesture . . . [indeed] of these the actor can give no more idea by his face or gesture than the eye (without a metaphor) can speak, or the muscles utter intelligible sounds.135 Like the earlier valorizations of Shakespeare that we have examined, there were other underlying issues. Lamb’s article, which in fact delineated the psychological particularities of all the major tragic characters, had more to do with the emergent status in the theatrical world of the literary critic to whom the body of the actor was felt to be the greatest obstacle. ‘It is difficult for a frequent play-goer to disembarrass the idea of Hamlet’, as he acknowledged, ‘from the person and voice of Mr. K[emble]’.136 The writer from whose work I extracted the opening quotation also had Lamb’s text-centred attitude towards plays. According to him, ‘his readers’ were not possessed of ‘a strict and impartial view’ with regard to Remorse, because ‘none’, ‘after having seen it performed, have made it the lucubration of their closets’. If Lamb allows us to expose the history behind the treatment of drama as literature, that is, as a practice advocated by literary men to serve their own advancement, it is the latter that will enable us to understand the relegation that has by now occurred of the actor and the entire world of the performance to a subordinate rank. Consider: if, in the May 1813 issue of The British Review, when Remorse was two months removed from the regular repertory, he could be ‘sure that none of our readers . . . having seen it . . . can charge their memories with any very accurate account’, then, how recoverable, how relevant really does that same ‘exhibition’ become to us who are two centuries removed? The problematic ephemerality of the performance event is underscored in J. C. C. Mays’ recent edition of the work, which lists five different running times for the

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1813 production alone (PW (CC), III, p. 1042). The script might not be the play, but as ‘the most stable element in the line of transmission’,137 surely it is the textual component that is the most important? This assumption is implicit in the ‘Stage Version’ of Remorse presented by Mays, a 70-page transcript based on ‘an interleaved copy [of the first edition] marked up for staging by W. West’ (PW (CC), III, p. 1054). The West copy, however, is not the only text of Remorse to have been specially annotated for the stage. Thomas Dibdin, who was the official prompter, had a similarly modified version. Then there is the corrected copy that the management dispatched to the Theatres Royal at Hull and York, where the play also saw production (in March and April respectively). Which of these three adjusted first editions was the script used by Drury Lane has not been definitively ascertained. The suggestion that the West copy ‘represents the Stage version . . . arrived at with C[oleridge] ‘s assistance by mid-Feb 1813’ (PW (CC), III, p. 1056) – which correlates the text containing ‘the most deletions’ (PW (CC), III, p. 1055) with the performance when it was at its briefest (PW (CC), III, p. 1042) – opens an interesting possibility: given that the play experienced variation on five occasions (as evidenced in the running time), could the Hull and Dibdin copies not be stage versions as well? To complicate matters, by the middle of February the ‘Second Edition’ of Remorse was published with the following claim: ‘From the necessity of hastening the Publication I was obliged to send the Manuscript intended for the Stage: which is the sole cause of the number of directions printed in Italics.’138 This text, considered to be the ‘Printed Version’ (PW (CC), III, p. 1227), actually increases the number of stage directions in the original edition. More significantly, it goes against the grain of deletions established by the three corrected copies in featuring 63 lines more dialogue,139 over half of which involved Alhadra. The part was unanimously well received, and it would be characteristic of the author if the work had been modified to suit the prevailing taste. Henry Crabb Robinson, a journalist and barrister, typified the reaction of his contemporaries ‘in saying [after “the first performance”] that its poetical is far greater than its dramatic merit’.140 The result? Additional passages in the second edition for Alhadra – and for Isidore and Ordonio141 – in the mode of the poetical descriptive: Oh! would to Alla, The raven, or the sea-mew, were appointed To bring me food! or rather that my soul Could drink in life from the universal air! It were a lot divine in some small Skiff Along some Ocean’s boundless solitude, To float for ever with a careless course, And think myself the only Being alive!142

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Mays’s arrangement of the first and second edition into a ‘Stage/Printed’ binary effectively excludes the later text from the performance event. This cannot be substantiated from the work itself, for which Coleridge has chosen to retain much of the original prefatory material including the compliments to the cast.143 Besides, when Drury Lane re-staged the play in 1817, and Smith opted to play Alhadra instead of Teresa (PW (CC), III, p. 1034), need there be any doubt about her favouring for performance the second version where Alhadra had a larger role? With respect to the 1813 production, we have another significant textual variant to deal with: the manuscript that was sent to the censor James Larpent on 5 January. This text might be the more pertinent documentary representative for the performance at the earlier stages, when Remorse was still unpublished. A new play by an unknown playwright usually required two or three successful nights on stage to interest a publisher, and about the same length of time again to produce; therefore, none of the other four variants should have been in existence before 28 January.144 It is important to establish this because the first of the pre-28 January performances almost certainly departed from the text that Coleridge eventually issued, as his letter of 25 January 1813 attests: [T]hat most beastly Assassination of Ordonio by the Moor . . . was so far from being a deed of mine, that I saw it perpetrated for the first time on Saturday Night. I absolutely had the Hiss half way out of my Lips & retracted it, as I have seen a costive Dog introsuscept his White Greek. It is, perhaps, almost the only case in which scenic Life is the same as real Life – We can as little endure the imitation of absolute Baseness, as we can it’s reality. It is now altered [to] . . . ‘those little ones will crowd around and ask me – Where is our Father? I shall curse thee then!’ the cry of rescue! Alvar! Alvar! and the Voice of Valdez is heard from behind the Scenes – and Alhadra with those words – Ha! A rescue! – and Isidore unrevenged! The deed be mine! (stabs Ordonio) Now take my Life! (CL, III, p. 428) The ‘altered’ text given above is identical in wording to the first edition. To obtain some idea of what the performance might have been like before Coleridge’s emendation, an earlier text is required; this is the Larpent version of the same episode: ALHADRA Those little ones will crowd around & ask me, Where is our father? I shall curse thee then! Wert thou in heaven, my curse wou’d pluck thee hence TERESA

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See! See! He doth repent! I kneel to thee! Be merciful . . . ALL THE BAND No mercy! no mercy! (Naomi suddenly advances & Stabs Ordonio Alvar rushes forward and catches him in his arms) (PW (CC), III, pp. 1188–1189) Coleridge referring to the killer of Ordonio as ‘the Moor’ implicates a Middle Eastern man, rather than a Middle Eastern woman. That the reviews published in the immediate aftermath of the first performance do not specify who killed Ordonio is significant too. Try and visualize the leading players surrounded by a horde of cosmetically darkened actors; one moment, Teresa is pleading for mercy; in the next, Ordonio is stabbed and falls dying into the arms of Alvar – Naomi as the killer at that juncture would have been doubly inconspicuous from the swiftness of the action and smallness of the role. A political leader fatally wounded by a near anonymous assailant among a gathering crowd was basically the circumstances of Spencer Percival’s assassination.145 When we register the strong feelings evoked in Coleridge by the death of the Prime Minister, which prompted an obituary for The Courier (EOT (CC), II, pp. 347–349) and his attending the execution of the guilty party,146 a killing scene along the lines of the Larpent manuscript might well be that unwelcome reminder to him of how ‘scenic Life is the same as real Life’.147 The ending is not the only variation offered by the Larpent manuscript. It deviates significantly from the other versions of Remorse with respect to the third act, where it in fact resembles Osorio. The conjuration scene is the extended form as in the 1797 text, and the love interest still a passive ingénue instead of the passionate and principled heroine desired by Smith. With three weeks left before the opening performance (23 January) and publication (28 January?), there is the patent prospect of at least one more variant further along the line of production: a missing link containing the Larpent ‘Assassination’ and the authorial modifications to satisfy the leading lady. Bearing in mind the six versions that Mays has now uncovered, plainly the ‘script’ of Remorse – treated almost invariably by the literary critic (past and present) as a singular entity – is less a ‘stable element’ than something upon which stability has been conferred in order to facilitate ‘transmission’. Such a unitary impression is unhelpful when applied to Coleridge, who literally pursued the dissemination of his works through textual change. Different times give rise to different tastes, and the practice of revision is an eminently logical tactic to ensure the continued progress of a literary product towards posterity.

Conclusion

Coleridge was a radical during the 1790s. He spoke against the political union existing in England between Religion and the State; he castigated his country’s participation in the Slave Trade; he criticized the war with France, which he called ‘unjust’ and ‘unnecessary’ (Lects 1795 (CC), p. 59); his poetry and journalism presented scenes of national and international distress that he attributed to the invisible hand of commercialism. Coleridge, during the 1790s, sounds rather similar to an anti-Capitalist today on Globalization or the war in Iraq. His commitment to political change is measurable by the pervasiveness of reformist issues across his early writings. One does need to look for them, however, for these displays of his political colours are often covert. With the 1798 version of ‘Frost of Midnight’, Coleridge used an overtly domestic situation; with the 1798 version of ‘The Ancient Mariner’, they are obfuscated by an overtly fantastic subject matter; in 1795, his radicalism is underwritten by an otherworldly religious posture; with the 1797 version of Remorse (i.e. Osorio), they are expressed by a character who is the stuff of escapist entertainment: a black female revolutionary leader. The notoriously oppressive political climate of the 1790s is a clear reason for these tactics, and, as I have highlighted in Chapters 1 and 3, during this period Coleridge had thought of himself as a marked man. Nevertheless, given how the religious enthusiasm he had been connected with was already under suspicion as a vehicle for radical politics, and given how the publications of known radicals were scrutinized by the pro-government journals, what kind of protection could he have really expected from this strategy? After all, local supporters of the established Church had managed to bring the Bristol series of lectures in which he delivered the ‘allegoric vision’ to a premature end. While the complicated subterfuge I insist he engaged in with the 1798 version of ‘Frost at Midnight’ might have been successful, it is obscure to the point of being self-defeating: the Marian image at the end of the poem was a victory that only an inner circle of like-minded friends could have conceivably appreciated. Faced with an increasingly vigilant establishment demonstrating multiple instances of its willingness to crack down on political dissent, the main line of Romantic scholarship on the issue essentially has Coleridge and other middleclass radicals retreating en masse from their former ideals and converting into

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pro-government hardliners.1 This perspective seems to me to be far more reflective of the experience of political persecution in America and elsewhere under the spectre of Communism, that is, in the 1950s, 1960s or 1970s, than of Coleridge’s actual circumstances under the spectre of Revolution. The pressure on him to convert pales in comparison with that faced by a middle-class intellectual targeted by McCarthyism or the Cultural Revolution. Coleridge’s contributions to the Morning Post after April 1798 became more moderate,2 but in the absence of truly pressing factors, were these changes heartfelt or were they tactical? My examination of ‘Frost of Midnight’ shows that these recanting manoeuvres of Coleridge’s should not be taken at face value; Coleridge did eventually convert to Anglicanism, but – as my exegesis of the revisions implies – it was a gradual process that took place from 1804 to 1806 during his stay in the Mediterranean. Coleridge’s notorious ‘apostasy’ did not begin in 1798; neither was this shift something that possessed him for the rest of his life. Rather, my study portrays him to be as vulnerable as we all are to our respective histories. The year 1811 – when Coleridge made his greatest contribution to the Tory establishment through The Courier, for which he altered his originally anti-Anglican ‘allegoric vision’ of 1795 into an alarmist tirade against the very foes of Anglicanism – was also the year when the reach of Napoleon from abroad and political activism at home seemed the most dangerous. As these threats receded, so did his support for the government. The ‘allegoric vision’ that he published in 1817 is not only more temperate in tone than the 1811 version, it also is less evidently Tory: it flew in the face of the official line by featuring a portrait of Edmund Burke that was less than sonorous. Coleridge’s change of heart actually dates back to July 1811, when at the very height of his ‘apostasy’ he encountered irrefutable evidence of The Courier being a government publication. His opponents in the press had been insisting upon this, and he had always maintained that he was ‘of no Party’: so perhaps he felt used? In 1812, his contribution to the newspaper drops noticeably and never recovers. In 1815, he participated in a popular protest against a State-sponsored bill. My examination of the 1817 version of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ has charted similar resistances across his writings, that is, from 1816 to 1818. Coleridge stayed on with The Courier probably because he needed the money. He had no other job to turn to in 1812: he had tried in vain to find work with another newspaper. The year 1812 was also the year when Josiah Wedgwood decided to withdraw half of Coleridge’s annuity. In the latter part of 1811, we find Coleridge starting a new series of lectures on Shakespeare and Milton at Scot’s Corporation hall. We find him turning to Longman, hoping that the publisher who brought out the poems of his radical years would sponsor a new collection. Several months later, we find him turning to Thomas Curtis to publish The Friend. In 1812, he was working with Drury Lane to bring to the stage the play that the previous proprietor had rejected in 1797. Seen in this light, Remorse might have been one of several attempts

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by Coleridge to distance himself from the Courier. While the obituary he would write in response to the assassination of Spencer Perceval was undeniably Tory (EOT (CC), II, pp. 347–349), through Remorse he would help to further the aims of an organization that was undeniably Whig in orientation. The fact that a leading government and a leading Opposition newspaper could so obviously come to a common agreement to promote him is indicative, I suspect, of the centrist political space that he came to occupy. The success of Remorse revived Coleridge’s literary career. In 1816, he published Christabel and The Statesman’s Manual; in 1817, he published A Lay Sermon, Biographia Literaria, Sibylline Leaves and Zapolya; in 1818, the London Philosophical Society engaged him for a series of lectures on poetry and drama; The Friend was republished in 3 volumes: Coleridge stopped writing for The Courier in 1818 because by then he believed he could. The revitalization of Coleridge’s literary career in the immediate postNapoleonic period was indebted to a textual corpus that he had created two decades earlier during the post-revolutionary ferment of the 1790s. This is certainly the case with the poetry. Poems as published works are as much the expression of the individual as of the society for which they are produced, so, theoretically, Coleridge’s revisions should be indicative as much of the changes to his ideological makeup as of his social context. ‘Frost at Midnight’ and ‘The Ancient Mariner’, both written in the late 1790s and both republished in 1817, feature revisions that give a mutually reinforcing testimony of the pressures Coleridge was (or felt himself to be) under. Foremost was the burden of a radical past, kept in the public domain by the efforts of enemies in the press,3 which he desperately wanted to be rid off in a society that was steadily hardening against dissent. ‘Frost at Midnight’ does not seem to be political today because the work we are familiar with – the final version of 1829 – has had its politics erased. Coleridge removed the final six lines of the poem, taking away its specific political direction; he separated it from ‘Fears in Solitude’ and ‘France, an Ode’, placed it with domestic and meditative poems and insisted that it be read as such. I have noted the depoliticizing effect of the revisions that Coleridge instituted for ‘The Ancient Mariner’, how the mystical poem we are familiar with today has been forged at the expense of a more socially grounded first version. My study of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ has also traced the impact of his readership, directly, through privileged readers such as Wordsworth, and the empowered readers of the literary journals, and, indirectly, through the close attention Coleridge paid to the poems that sold well: ‘The Ancient Mariner’ was detached from the gothic supernaturalism that originally inspired it because of market trends. Remorse is another outstanding case of Coleridge’s indebtedness to his fruitful radical years, even if the revisions that shaped the play reveal different motivations. Though market forces played a part in the selection and lavish presentation of the Spanish melodrama, politics does not seem to have been a

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consideration at all: the play that was submitted to the censor (the Larpent manuscript) suffered no diminution whatsoever in its radical content. The size of Alhadra’s part was subsequently reduced for the actual performance of 1813, but this was done to suit the cast. Indeed, once the play had been accepted for production, Coleridge’s greatest concern by far was to satisfy the leading performers. There are two possible reasons why his political sensitivities might have taken a back seat. First, Drury Lane was a Whig establishment: he could hardly have toned down the very sentiments that had made the play attractive to the organization in the first place. Secondly, it might have been a case of different genres engendering different expectations. Plays, which held a far lower cultural status than poems, were less stridently policed. The need to have a performance script vetted by a government official notwithstanding, it was almost unheard of for a play to be suppressed. Besides, the clientele that regularly frequented playhouses was widely supposed to expect provocative entertainment anyway: acrobatic feats, dancing animals, child prodigies and prostitutes. The only revision that Coleridge made in 1813 that might have been politically motivated was his rejection of Naomi killing Ordonio. As the event is unique to the Larpent manuscript, I have taken him at his word on it being the work of another person. Yet, how believable is Coleridge’s claim that he did not see his own play through to the end until the first performance of 23 January? Perhaps the variant in the Larpent manuscript was his idea, an innovation he decided later to disown because of the adverse reaction of the audience? If so, his restoration of the killing of Ordonio by Alhadra is really more indicative of market pressures than of the author’s particular political persuasion. Choosing to believe Coleridge, as I have done, however, raises the issue of co-authorship with respect to the preparation of Remorse for the stage. Apart from the principal actors and actresses, who, as I have demonstrated in Chapter 4, had their say in the formation of Remorse, there was also the stage manager to contend with: ‘Mr. Arnold’, in fact, would not have needed to consult with Coleridge to institute changes. With Remorse, we not only have a devolved or decayed authorship to deal with, we also have a problem with textual authority. We have three possible stage versions; all corrected first editions, therefore, all inadequately representative of the play in the earliest days of its performance when the book had yet to exist. With Remorse, we have three printed texts in the space of a single year, so it has not always been possible for me to segregate them into the same neat historical fields that I have pursued with ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and the ‘allegoric vision’. A solution would be to narrow the time zones of my model, especially the zone of synchronous development, to three months or less. This would probably work for Coleridge, but what about a study of Byron’s revisions whose works attained seven or more editions in a single year? I am suddenly reminded of Alan Liu’s embarrassing ‘Epilogue’ to Wordsworth: The Sense of History (1989) that articulates the historicist’s method of using

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literary texts, as a lawyer would use witness testimonials, to arrange circumstantial data.4 It is embarrassing because it reveals the historicist’s desire to touch the face of his god: ‘to recover … the actual stuff of the past’. My multiple text approach may bring the historicist closer to this goal by exponentially increasing the number of available testimonies – but can we not go further and extend this multiple text approach to the surrounding non-literary materials as well? On the other hand, perhaps I should not be embarrassed by Liu’s revelation because I know that unlike him I am neither interested in mastering texts nor affirmative truths. I mean can we produce an edition containing every version of every one of Byron’s poems, for example? Even if we could, what would be the purpose? Would sifting through every representation of each literary or literalized event ever allow us to experience that moment in the flesh, as it were, or provide us with an irrefutable interpretation? No, in truth, I am more interested in the selection and the processes of selection. More to the point, I believe it is the overriding duty of the textual pluralist to multiply data in such a way so that comprehensive statements become impossible. For once we realize that we cannot encompass everything, we choose. In choosing, whatever is lost of the Past is left for the Future: for it is in the choices we make that we reveal ourselves, our timeliness.

Notes

Introduction 1

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As Paul Keen has pointed out, ‘[a]n important part of the current challenge to entrenched assumptions about the study of English Literature necessarily involves addressing the question of the nature of the social spaces that we occupy as we engage with these issues’; see The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 19. An observation I owe to Jack Stillinger, Coleridge and Textual Instability (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 130. James Thorpe’s essay has been reprinted several times; I am referring to the expanded version in Principles of Textual Criticism (California: Huntington Library, 1972), see p. 47. Ibid., p. 42. Hans Zeller, ‘A new approach to the critical constitution of literary texts’, Studies in Bibliography 28 (1975), 237 & 245. Abrams, M. H., ‘Coleridge’s “a light in sound”’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 116 (1972), 458–476. Kelvin Everest, Coleridge’s Secret Ministry: The Context of the Conversation Poems 1795– 1798 (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1979), p. 198. See Jerome J. McGann’s The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 135–172. The Romantic Ideology and A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1983. McGann, A Critique, p. 125. Mays told me this during the course of a memorable conversation that I had with him at Cork, Ireland, in February 1998. Jack Stillinger, ‘Textual primitivism and the editing of Wordsworth’, Studies in Romanticism 28 (1989), 3–28. Ibid., 27. Evident, for example, in the prominence Robert Brinkley accords to him in the introduction to Romantic Revisions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992): a collection of essays by the leading specialists on the subject. Zachary Leader, Revision and Romantic Authorship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 124. Leader is quoting Jack Stillinger’s ‘The multiple versions of Coleridge’s poems’; Studies in Romanticism 31 (1992), 140–141.

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Stillinger, Coleridge and Textual Instability, p. 137. Ibid., p. 27. A fine example is The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850: Authoritative Texts, Context and Reception, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, Meyer Howard Abrams and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979). Incidentally, Stillinger also accused Wordsworth and Gill of ‘textual primitivism’ in his essay of 1989. That is, in Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner: An Experimental Edition of Texts and Revisions 1798–1828 (New York: Station Hill, 1993). Thorpe: ‘our only reasonable test of when the work has achieved integrity is . . . [the author’s] willingness to release it to his usual public’; see Principles of Textual Criticism, p. 38. Stillinger, Coleridge and Textual Instability, p. 132. Leader, Revision and Romantic Authorship, pp. 142–143. Thorpe, Principles of Textual Criticism, p. 38. Zeller, ‘A new approach’, 244. Leader, Revision and Romantic Authorship, p. 15. Leader, for example, clearly subscribes to the authority of final intentions: ‘Everyone can be said to change over time, just as every alteration to a poem, however minor, can be said to make the poem “new”. But it is also perfectly sensible to see almost all the alterations . . . as working towards intentions – thematic and formal – present from the poem’s inception’; ibid., p. 131. J. C. C. Mays, ‘Reflections on having edited Coleridge’s poems’, Romantic Revisions, p. 141. Compare Mays’s quotation of ‘The picture; or, the lover’s resolution’ in ‘Reflections’, p. 142, with the same poem in PW (CC), II, p. 916: their respective renditions are virtually identical. Note also the extensiveness and accuracy of description that he had given of the then upcoming PW (CC) in ‘Reflections’, pp. 141–146. In the case of ‘Frost at Midnight’, Mays chooses the text that Coleridge published in 1829. As for ‘The Ancient Mariner’, it is the 1834 version (which contains the author’s last changes) that has precedence over the one published in 1798 (that is, the form in which it first appeared): while Mays prints both poems as his ‘Reading Text’ (cf. PW (CC), I, pp. 370–419) it is the version of 1834 that he selects as the base for the ‘Variorum Text’ (cf. PW (CC), II, pp. 509–532). I am here of course referring to PW (CC), II. Mays, ‘Reflections’, pp. 147–148. Paul Magnuson, Reading Public Romanticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 5–6. The pronouncement here reminds me of Jameson’s call for a critical exegesis that ‘involves the hypothetical reconstruction of the materials – content, narrative paradigms, stylistic and linguistic practices – which had to have been given in advance in order for that particular text to be produced in its unique historical specificity’ in The Political Unconscious (London: Methuen, 1981), pp. 57–58. Magnuson repackages this strategy to take into account the spanner hurled at cultural interpretation by Jacques Derrida: La Vérité en Peinture – first translated into English in 1987 as The Truth in Painting – whose deconstructionist oeuvre is specifically interested in moving the interpretative eye away from the aesthetic content to ‘the frame’.

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Robert Keith Lapp, Contest for Cultural Authority (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), pp. 31–32. Stillinger, Coleridge and Textual Instability, pp. 61–67. Jack Stillinger, Reading the Eve of St. Agnes: the Multiples of Complex Literary Transaction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 39–77. Ibid., p. 131. J. C. C. Mays’s remarks on editing Coleridge’s poetry is symptomatic of the modern day malaise that has, I think, afflicted many of the more theoreticallyminded members of his profession – that is, of negatively conceiving this ‘intervention’ as a form of contamination: ‘One cannot deduce a rule from Coleridge’s collections which isolates and arranges the body of his “best” poems, unencumbered by “everything else” . . . There is no way of arranging the poems, in a way which suggests their different kinds of status and the relation between them, which is not an interference’ (PW (CC), I, p. cxviii). Russ Greer, ‘The architectonics of multiplicity: a Bakhtinian critique of three books by Jack Stillinger’, Text 14: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2002), p. 301. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 158. ‘In many respects, it matters little what species of determinism is used to argue the death of the author. Whether we see the subject as constituted in and through language, history or episteme, the postulation of a prior constitutive cause does not deny the constituted entity its existence, nor does it prevent that entity in turn causing something else’; Sean Burke, The Death and Return of the Author, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), pp. 140–141. ‘Given that works of art exist as symbolic objects only if they are known and recognized, that is, socially instituted as works of art and received by spectators capable of knowing and recognizing them as such, the sociology of art and literature has to take as its object not only the material production but also the symbolic production of the work, i.e. the production of the value of the work or, which amounts to the same thing, of belief in the value of the work . . . In short, it is a question of understanding works of art as a manifestation of the field as a whole, in which all the powers of the field, and all the determinisms inherent in its structure and functioning, are concentrated,’ Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, trans. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), p. 37. This thesis is principally an attempt at discovering what Raymond Williams has succinctly described as ‘the truly social in the individual’; see Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 197. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. James Strachey and Anna Freud, 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), IV, 169, 218. The year 1829, which saw Coleridge’s last major publication – On the Constitution of Church and State – also marks the last time in which he revised his poems to any comprehensive degree. I believe these two phenomena to be connected, my failure to turn up any strong connections notwithstanding. Stillinger, Coleridge and Textual Instability, p. 132.

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In the spirit, for example, of Steve Clark and Masashi Suzuki’s collection of essays on The Reception of Blake in the Orient (London and New York: Continuum, 2006). In addition to the 1829 version of ‘Frost at Midnight’, I really have no firm historical evidence to substantiate my assertions about the legacy of Burke in post-Napoleonic England: my best example of the enduring image of Burke as ‘Catholic priest’ – Spectres Visiting John Bull – is nearly ten years too early.

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Anti-Jacobin or Weekly Examiner, 9 July 1798. Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine 1 (1798), 115–116. The 18 poems that Wordsworth contributed to the 1798 Lyrical Ballads netted only 30 guineas; according to Stillinger, Coleridge and Textual Instability, p. 15. As noted by Paul Magnuson in ‘The politics of “Frost at Midnight”’, Wordsworth Circle 22 (1991), 4. Anti-Jacobin, 9 July 1798. Vicesimus Knox, The Spirit of Despotism (London: William Hone, 1822), p. 79. ‘Every cultural practice had become politicized: was understood, or was liable to be represented in terms of the division between . . . supposed loyalists and alleged radicals . . . that conflict, and the atmosphere of suspicion it gave rise to, [was] . . . ubiquitous’; John Barrell, Spirit of Despotism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 8. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Fears in Solitude, Written . . . During the Alarm of an Invasion (London: Johnson, 1798), p. 4. Ibid., p. 7. Analytical Review 28 (1798), 592. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poems . . . to Which Are Now Added Poems by Charles Lamb, and Charles Lloyd, 2nd edn (London: Cottle, 1797), p. 45. Anti-Jacobin, 9 July 1798. To Edmund Burke, who switched to the Tory cause in the 1790s, ‘universal benevolence’ – as Jon Mee puts it – ‘was simply a dangerous form of enthusiasm [to which the] radicals were little more than playthings . . . sacrificing a proper sense of self and the stability of the commercial and social order to their improbable visions of futurity’; see Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 47. Peter Porcupine, The Life of Thomas Paine, Interspersed with Remarks and Reflections (London: J. Wright, 1797), pp. 12, 24. Coleridge, Fears, p. 9. Barrell, The Spirit of Despotism, pp. 4, 8. For more information, refer to ibid., p. 245. According to Paul Magnuson, ‘The shaping of “Fears in Solitude”’, Coleridge’s Theory of the Imagination Today, ed. Christine Gallant (New York: AMS Press, 1989), pp. 206–207. The topic is more extensively explored by Harriet Guest’s Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 271–339. Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation, pp. 136–141.

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Coleridge, Fears, pp. 8–9. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., p. 5. The owlet also turns up in ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’; refer to the anonymously published Lyrical Ballads, With a Few Other Poems (London: Arch, 1798), p. 45. ‘Atheism is an “owlet” presumably because it fancies itself wise although new-hatched and only equipped with the night vision of learning, useless for seeing the self-evident truth of religion’; Martin Priestman, Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 152. Coleridge, Fears, p. 11. Ibid., pp. 19–20. Humphrey House makes the connection between the two poems in Coleridge: The Clark Lectures 1951–52 (London: Hart-Davis, 1953), pp. 78–79. As does Jack Stillinger in Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 102–103. Harriet Guest links Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (London: Johnson, 1796) with Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’ in ‘Modern love: feminism and sensibility in 1796’, New Formations 28 (1996), 17–18. At least the passage Coleridge quoted in that important letter of 10 March 1798 to George (CL, I, pp. 397–398). Wordsworth’s poem was eventually published after a series of revisions as Book One of The Excursion (1814). William Cowper, The Task, a Poem (London: Johnson, 1785), pp. 151–152. Wollstonecraft, Letters, pp. 11–15. Coleridge, Fears, pp. 5, 20. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p. 22. ‘Let me suggest . . . that the basic contrast in Frost at Midnight is the difference between the speaker’s recollected upbringing in the city and his son’s prospective upbringing in nature and, correspondingly, that the structure [of the poem] is a series of movements from confinement (the speaker indoors, in the schoolroom, in the city) to an opening-out (the son’s growing up among lakes and mountains); from the mind’s fancying . . . to an apprehension of “God . . . in all, and all things in himself”’; Stillinger, Multiple Authorship, p. 101. Coleridge, Fears, p. 20. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 18. Anti-Jacobin, 9 July 1798. Analytical Review 28 (1798), 592. Coleridge, Fears, p. 23. Critical Review 26 (1799), 474. Coleridge, Fears, see pp. 19, 23.

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Anti-Jacobin, 20 November 1797. Anti-Jacobin Review 1 (1798), v. David Miall, ‘The displacement of emotions: the case of “Frost at Midnight”’, Wordsworth Circle 20 (1989), 101. Coleridge, Fears, p. 20. In 1798 this is evident in his publications. By the time of ‘Frost at Midnight’, he was already a practising Unitarian preacher of several years, and if the Wedgwoods had not offered him an annuity he would have entered the Unitarian ministry. See Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989), pp. 176–177. ‘There is no internal evidence to identify the place of this lecture in the series’, according to the Bollingen editors (Lects 1795 (CC), p. 194), which is plainly incorrect. In fact, anti-Catholic sentiments do not surface again until his notebook entries of 1804. The practice of tithing was an economic grievance at the Church of England (EOT (CC), II, p. 266 footnote 8). For more information on the relationship between Catholics and Dissenters, refer to John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London: Darton, 1975), pp. 7, 352, 396. The Latin version was first published in 1801, with the Morning Post, and the English in 1811 with the Courier. From then on, both Latin and English versions appeared in every collection of Coleridge’s poetry until his death. There were hundreds of these exiles in London, who had been coming since 1792. My historical account draws heavily from Bernard Ward’s The Dawn of Catholic Revival in England, 1781–1803, 2 vols (London: Longmans, 1909), II, p. 180. William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 338. Coleridge, Fears, p. 23. Ursula Henriques, Religious Toleration in England 1787–1833 (London: Routledge, 1961), p. 137. Challoner was the first to take the Irish settlers seriously as a missionary problem. Though they did not get a chapel until the foundation of St. Patrick’s, Soho, in 1793 – more than a decade after the death of Challoner – he, and the priests he left, had ensured that they were provided for outside the framework of the English congregations and chapels. See Bossy, The English Catholic Community, pp. 311–314. For the 1812 version of ‘Frost at Midnight’, refer to the Poetical Register and Repository of Fugitive Poetry 7 (1812), 530–532. Noted by Stillinger, in Coleridge and Textual Instability, p. 54. The word ‘rondo’ had only recently entered English and was still strictly musical terminology (see OED, XIV, p. 71). Donald Sultana, Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Malta and Italy (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969), pp. 46–47. That is, in Bossy, The English Catholic Community: see pp. 7, 352, 396. Refer to Arthur O’Connor’s Speech . . . in the House of Commons of Ireland . . . upon the Important Question of Catholic Emancipation (London: Jordan, 1795); and the

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anonymously delivered, far more militant Orations . . . on the Grand Question of Catholic Emancipation (Cork: Haly, 1795). I am assuming that Bossy is right on The Garden of the Soul being the standard text of the community. In this work, a regime of private prayer is combined with a strong dose of moral aphorizing – as its alternative title indeed suggests: A Manual of Spiritual Exercises and Instructions for Christians. Cf. The English Catholic Community, pp. 364–370. For a specialized treatment of English Catholic devotion refer to Mary Heimann’s Catholic Devotion in Victorian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), which has comments that are applicable to the Romantic period. One of the differences between the English and Irish versions of The Garden of the Soul was the lack of religious iconography in the former. There is no religious picture to accompany the London edition of 1793, for example, which is certainly not the case with the Dublin production of 1798. For more information, refer to Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions, pp. 342–362. Not surprising then that Sultana notes ‘his failure to make a single Maltese friend’; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, p. 277. Where they had once taken tithes, for example, they now collected ‘Offerings’; furthermore, in the 1811 version, they were ‘clothed in ceremonial robes’ and performed rituals of purification. See Rosemary Ashton, The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 236–239. Noted by Stillinger, Coleridge and Textual Instability, p. 55. Cowper, The Task, p. 151. Ibid., pp. 151–152. Two versions of Aids to Reflection were published in Coleridge’s lifetime, that is, in 1825 and 1831. The text of the Bollingen edition is based on the 2nd edition. Kevin Gilmartin, Writing Against Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 242.

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sibylline Leaves: A Collection of Poems (London: Fenner, 1817), p. 17. John Livingstone Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (London: Constable, 1927), p. 241. Ibid., pp. 48, 53. TT (CC) is based on the second edition of 1836, which adds the word ‘standard’ to the original text. As far as poems are historically localized utterances – as Magnuson has subtly distinguished in Reading Public Romanticism, pp. 5–6 – then the first version, being closest to the very conditions that produced it, should have precedence with respect to the decoding of that original context. I am not, however, here advocating the primacy of the first edition: the authority of particular versions ultimately rests upon the purposes of the critic and his or her readers.

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Anonymous [Samuel Taylor Coleridge], ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’, in Lyrical Ballads, pp. 1–51. William Empson and David Pirie (eds), Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Selected Poetry (Manchester: Carcanet, 1989 reprint), pp. 29–30. Debbie Lee, Slavery and the Romantic Imagination (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), p. 53. Anonymous, Lyrical Ballads, pp. 16–18. Patrick J. Keane, Coleridge’s Submerged Politics (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994), p. 308. Anonymous, Lyrical Ballads, p. 197. The drop in interest is probably due to the intensification of the war with France, which forestalled reform in many other areas of English society. Public interest in the state of the country’s penal complexes did not revive until about 1810, as Ernest L. Woodward has noted; see The Age of Reform 1815–1870, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 467. Monthly Review 29 (1799), 207. John Howard, The State of the Prisons in England and Wales, 4th edn (London: Johnson, 1792), pp. 9–10. From Peter Kemp’s The British Sailor (London: Dent, 1970), p. 164. Michael A. Lewis believes that typhus in the Navy – or ‘goal-fever’ as it was also termed – ‘reached its peak in the late 1790s’; A Social History of the Navy 1793–1815 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1960), p. 410. Morning Chronicle, 18 April 1797. Morning Post, 18 April 1797. Lewis, A Social History, pp. 99–100. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 2 vols (London: Dilly, 1791), I, p. 189. Lewis, A Social History, p. 136. My account of the mutiny at the Nore, including the long indented quotation later on the paragraph, is taken largely from George E. Manwaring and Bonamy Dobrée’s The Floating Republic (London: Bles, 1935), pp. 207–210. Charles Fletcher, A Maritime State Considered, as to the Health of Seamen (Dublin: Fletcher, 1786), pp. vii–ix. Anonymous, Lyrical Ballads, p. 190. Ibid., p. 75. Ibid., p. 18. Gilbert Blane, Letters, &c. on the Subject of Quarantine (London: Philantropic Reform, 1799). Parliament passed on that date the Act . . . for Erecting a Lazaret on Chetney Hill, County of Kent. While poems are localized historical utterances, poets are not unconscious automatons passively reflecting the sum total of their circumstances. They can (and often do) multiply the resonances of any single moment through their writings. A necessary note of caution to sound, I think, as we face the trend of ever more detailed historical data being used to prescribe fixed critical readings: a case in point being the recent attempts to settle the identity of the female spectre (as typhus, see Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 97–108; as yellow fever, see Lee, Slavery and the Romantic Imagination, pp. 47–65).

Notes 29 30

31

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33 34 35

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48 49 50 51 52

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Anonymous, Lyrical Ballads, p. 45. As the prefatory ‘Argument’ informs us, only on reaching ‘the tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean’ do ‘the strange things’ occur; ibid., p. 3. Gilbert Blane, Observations on the Diseases Incident to Seamen (London: Murray, 1785), p. 278. Elliot Arthy, The Seaman’s Medical Advocate (London: Richardson and Egerton, 1798), p. 20. Counting only the publications in England: four books. As quoted by Lewis, in A Social History, p. 406. Thomas Trotter, Medicina Nautica: An Essay on the Diseases of Seamen (London: Cadell and Davis, 1797), p. 322. The stanza is from ‘The Exile’, a poem in Mathew Gregory Lewis’ The Monk (1796). Coleridge’s review appeared in February 1797. For more information refer to SW & F (CC), II, pp. 57–65. ‘[The] two hundred sailors . . . die with the rapidity frequently ascribed to epidemic fevers’; as Alan Bewell also observes in Romanticism and Colonial Disease, p. 105. Arthy, The Seaman’s Medical Advocate, p. 218. Ibid., pp. 14–15. Anonymous, Lyrical Ballads, p. 21. Arthy, The Seaman’s Medical Advocate, p. 233. Anonymous, Lyrical Ballads, p. 48. For example, Keane’s Coleridge’s Submerged Politics, pp. 216–217; and Ian Haywood’s Bloody Romanticism: Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 31. The notable exception is Alan Bewell, who connects the poem to the colonial experience of disease; see Romanticism and Colonial Disease, pp. 97–108. Arthy, The Seaman’s Medical Advocate, pp. 82–83. The Times, 20 July 1798. George Shelvocke, A Voyage Round the World (London: Senex, 1726), pp. 71–73. Fifteen: a remarkable number considering that America did not have a single publication on the disease before 1793. Arthy, The Seaman’s Medical Advocate, p. 4. Blane, Observations, p. 276. Anonymous, Lyrical Ballads, p. 19. Blane, Observations, see pp. 398–399. According to Christopher Lloyd, refer to Medicine and the Navy 1200–1900, 4 vols (Edinburgh: Livingstone, 1957–1963), III, pp. 344–345. Robert Southey, Poems (Bristol: Cottle, 1797), p. 42. This general suspicion was taken up in medical circles by Colin Chisholm, in his Essay on the Malignant Pestilential Fever, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: Mawman, 1801), I, p. xxv. Southey, Poems, p. 144. Ibid., p. 92. In Coleridge’s own writings, we need only read the Conciones ad Populum (1795) to find references to the issues at hand (the trade in slaves, ‘the loathsome

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83 84 85 86 87

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pestilence . . . in the West-Indies’, ‘crimping’ and other the appalling conditions of military service; see (Lects 1795 (CC), pp. 58–59, 71–72). Anonymous, Lyrical Ballads, p. 9. Ibid., p. 14. Regulations and Instructions Relating to His Majesty’s Service at Sea, 13th edn (London: Royal Navy, 1790), p. 46. Anonymous, Lyrical Ballads, p. 28. Lewis, A Social History, pp. 102–103. Jack Nasty-face used the term in Nautical Economy; or, Forecastle Recollection of Events During the Last War (London: Robinson, 1836), p. 39. The first poem selected for commentary in the September issue, it was also specially highlighted in the periodical’s general ‘Preface’ for the year (Naval Chronicle 2 (1799), v–vi). Naval Chronicle 2 (1799), 328. According to Kenneth Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (New York: Norton, 1998), p. 538. ‘Prior to the Germany trip, poetry was one kind of writing for Wordsworth . . . and writing was one vocational option out of several. After Germany, Wordsworth considers no other form of remunerative labor’. From Brian Goldberg, The Lake Poets and Professional Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 217. According to Goldberg, ‘Wordsworth had had an extremely productive winter writing poetry . . . and when he returned to England he approached Lyrical Ballads with a new sense of professional entitlement’; refer to ibid., p. 219. Critical Review 24 (1798), 201. William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London, Longman, 1800), I, pp. 214–215. Analytical Review 28 (1798), 583. Monthly Review 29 (1799), 204. Naval Chronicle 2 (1799), 328. Ralph Fell was offered the position in 1802; refer to LL, II, p. 70. British Critic 14 (1799), 365. Anti-Jacobin Review 5 (1800), 434. An observation I owe to John E. Jordan’s Why the Lyrical Ballads? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 145–146. For more details refer to Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth, pp. 751–752. Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, I, p. vi. Charles Lloyd, Edmund Oliver, 2 vols (Bristol: Cottle, 1798), II, pp. 63–64. Robert Thomas Crossfield, The Trial . . . for High Treason (London: Gurney, 1796), pp. 117, 120–121. For an exhaustive account of the Pop-Gun Plot, including its broad implications, read John Barrell’s Imagining the King’s Death (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 445–503. Crossfield, The Trial, p. 325. Ibid., pp. 175–176. Ibid., p. 237. Ibid., p. 249. Ibid., p. 301.

Notes 88 89

90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

100 101

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110 111

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114 115 116 117 118 119 120

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According to Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth, p. 625. Refer to the 1798 and 1800 versions of the Lyrical Ballads, p. iv and I, p. 211 respectively. Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, I, pp. xviii–xix. Ibid., I, p. 214. I have counted different editions as entirely separate works. Anonymous, Lyrical Ballads, pp. iv–v. British Critic 14 (1799), 367. For Coleridge’s instructions, refer to CL, I, pp. 593–602. British Critic 14 (1799), 365. Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, see I, pp. 159, 161–162. Ibid., I, p. 153. William Shakespeare, The Plays, 2nd edn, Samuel Johnson, 8 vols (London: Tonson, 1765), VI, pp. 378–379. Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, see I, pp. 175–176. Compare the anonymously published Lyrical Ballads of 1798, p. 29, with the two-volume version published under Wordsworth’s name in 1800, I, p. 179. Anonymous, Lyrical Ballads, p. 29. Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, I, p. 179. McGann, The Beauty of Inflections, p.138. House, Coleridge, p. 92. Keane, Coleridge’s Submerged Politics, p. 161. Annual Register 57 (1816), pp. 19–24. Annual Register 57 (1816), vi. For more information on the complicated publication history of Biographia Literaria and Sibylline Leaves, refer to CL, III, pp. xlvii–lii and BL (CC), I, pp. xlv–lxv. Lord Byron, The Siege of Corinth (London: Murray, 1816), p. 56. Murray’s minimum issue for poetical pamphlets seems to have been 1,500 copies per edition; indeed, his first print run was often very much larger. Of Byron’s Poems (1816), which ran to two editions, 4,556 copies were printed (3,056 in the first edition). Of The Siege of Corinth, he printed 6,000 copies in the first edition. See Thomas J. Wise, A Bibliography of . . . Baron Byron, 2 vols (London: Dawsons, 1963), I, pp. 107, 112–113. ‘It remains that I should express my regret at the necessity of separating my compositions from some beautiful Poems of Mr. Coleridge, with which they have been long associated in publication’; stated by William Wordsworth, Poems . . . including Lyrical Ballads, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1815), I, p. xli. That is, on 8 January 1798. ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’ appeared as well in the Annual Anthology of 1800. Coleridge, Sibylline Leaves, p. 97. Ibid., pp. i–ii. The first was printed on 1 December 1794 – the last on 31 January 1795. London Magazine 2 (1820), 70. The Academic 17 (1821), 339. Edinburgh Review 16 (1810), 263. Francis Jeffrey was responsible for that single instance, which he directed at Marmon in April 1808.

154 121

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133 134

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Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, 4th edn (London: Longman, 1806), p. 342. Griggs suggests that Coleridge is referring to ‘Scott’s note to line 460, Canto I, on second sight’ in The Lady of the Lake (CL, IV, p. 561 footnote 2). Even if one accepts the very marginal connection of that particular note to ‘the employment of the Supernatural in Poetry and the Laws which regulate it’, it is difficult to see what there is for Coleridge to ‘answer to’. Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, p. 222. Edinburgh Review 6 (1805), 20. Ibid., 24 (1815), 294. British Review 8 (1813), 278. Literary Gazette 27 (1817), 50. Coleridge, Sibylline Leaves, p. 5. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., pp. 95–96. Ibid., p. 91. Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death, p. 646. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 6 vols (London: Strahan, 1776–1788), III, p. 188 and footnote. Coleridge, Sibylline Leaves, p. 15. Monthly Review 88 (1819), 34.

Chapter 3 1 2

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4 5

6

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James Thomson, The Castle of Indolence, 2nd edn (London: Millar, 1748), p. 42. Robert Hall, An Apology for the Freedom of the Press, and for General Liberty (London: Robinson, 1793), pp. 67–68. John Walsh, The Church of England c.1689–c.1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 18. Hall, An Apology for the Freedom of the Press, p. 25. ‘Priestley’s radical politics . . . occasioned the famous “Church and King” Birmingham riot of 1791, in which . . . a crowd destroyed his meeting-house, library and laboratory – an event which led directly to his later emigration to Pennyslvania in 1794’; Priestman, Romantic Atheism, p. 27. As quoted by William Reginald Ward, in Religion and Society in England 1790–1850 (London: Batsford, 1972), p. 23. The three worst affected areas. For a modern account of the riots that took place at the time, refer to Roger Wells’s Wretched Faces: Famine in Wartime England 1793– 1801 (Gloucester: Sutton, 1988), pp. 99–105, 419–429. That is, from reading Joseph Priestley’s An History of Early Opinions Concerning Jesus Christ (1786) and History of the Corruptions of Christianity (1782). Note that Coleridge’s quotation is considerably revised from the original (first published in 1774), which read: Thus Heaven enlarged his soul in riper years. For Nature gave him strength, and fire, to soar, On Fancy’s wing, above this vale of tears;

Notes

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Where dark cold-hearted sceptics, creeping, pore Through microscope of metaphysic lore: And much they grope for truth, but never hit. For why? their powers, inadequate before, This art preposterous renders more unfit; Yet deem they darkness light, and their vain blunders wit.

10

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26 27 28 29

30

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From James Beattie, The Minstrel; or, The Progress of Genius, 5th ed. (London: Dilly, 1775), p. 26. Hall, An Apology for the Freedom of the Press, p. 75. As a formulation, it probably developed in response to the loyalist discourse that had the ‘Dissenters . . . avow[ing] themselves repugnant to all religious establishments’ and the ‘Papists, acknowledging the supremacy of a foreign . . . spiritual sovereign’ as the twin bogeymen out to ‘shake our ecclesiastical establishment to its foundations’; refer to William Pitt’s Speech . . . Respecting the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts (London: C. Stuart, 1790), pp. 11–12. The statistical analysis here is extrapolated from Peter Virgin’s The Church in an Age of Negligence (Cambridge: Clarke, 1989), p. 254. Walsh, The Church of England, p. 14. Edinburgh Review 15 (1810), 504. Robert Waithman (1764–1833). Matthew Wood (1768–1843). Anonymous, The Faction Detected and Despised (London: Stockdale, 1810), pp. 6–7. Edinburgh Review 15 (1810), 504–505. Anonymous, The Faction Detected, p. 29. John Steven Watson, The Reign of George III, 1760–1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), pp. 468–469. This quotation and the one immediately following are from Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, a Poem (London: Johnson, 1812), pp. 4–14. Edward Palmer Thomson, The Making of the English Working Class, 3rd imp. (London: Gollancz, 1965), p. 543. See Bernard Ward, The Eve of Catholic Emancipation, 3 vols (London: Longmans, 1911), I, pp. 263–266. Annual Register 53 (1812), iv. Ibid., 55. For Francis Burdett’s view on the issue, refer to his Speech . . . at the Crown and Anchor Tavern . . . After his Liberation from the Tower (London: Barker, 1810), p. 19. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 440. The Examiner, 25 November 1810. Ibid. John Joseph Dillon, Considerations on the Necessity of Catholic Emancipation (London: Ridgway, 1811), p. xxxv. John Joseph Dillon, Two Memoirs Upon the Catholic Question (Bath: Meyer, 1810), pp. 1, 5. For more information read Ward, The Eve of Catholic Emancipation, I, pp. 49–82, 99–157.

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Henry Grattan, Speech on the Catholic Petition the 18th of May, 1810, and His Reply on the First of June (London: Ryan, 1810), pp. 4–5. Thomas Moore, A Letter to the Roman Catholics of Dublin (London: Carpenter, 1810), p. 18. See also Timothy Webb’s ‘A “great theatre of outrage and disorder”’: Figuring Ireland in the Edinburgh Review, in British Romanticism and the Edinburgh Review: Bicentenary Essays, ed. Duncan Wu and Demata Massimiliano (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 58–81, for Whig responses to Catholic Emancipation. Dillon, Considerations, p. xiii. Grattan, Speech, p. 50. Lord Viscount Castlereagh, Substance of the Speech Delivered . . . on . . . Mr. Grattan’s Motion for a Committee to Take into Consideration the Roman Catholic Petitions, ed. Robert Stewart (London: Stockdale, 1810), p. 5. Albion, Catholic Emancipation Discussed and Exploded (London: Blagdon, 1810), pp. 77–78. Castlereagh, Speech, p. 42. The bishop of Chichester employed the same tactic during his 1811 visitation to St. Michael’s Church, Lewes; cf. The Courier, 1 August 1811. For example, according to Donald MacRaild: ‘Negative attitudes [towards the Irish] had been welling up since the 1820s and were endemic by the 1830s’ – from Irish Migrants in Modern Britain, 1750–1922 (London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 57. Albion, Catholic Emancipation, p. 32. Webb has other examples from the time in ‘A “great theatre of outrage and disorder”’, p. 71. Castlereagh, Speech, pp. 12–14. Ibid., pp. 24–25. John Milner, An Enquiry into Certain Vulgar Opinions Concerning the Catholic Inhabitants and the Antiquities of Ireland, 2nd edn (London: Keating, undated), p. 46. The first edition of the work was published in 1808. My estimate is a conservative one amalgamating MacRaild’s very tentative indication on the scale of Irish immigration ‘during the French Wars’ in Irish Migrants, p. 10, the appraisals on the ‘number of Catholics in England’ by Ward, The Eve of Catholic Emancipation, I, p. 186, and by Bossy in The English Catholic Community, pp. 422–427. Ward, The Eve of Catholic Emancipation, I, p. 186. Albion, Catholic Emancipation, p. 15. Noted by Lyn Hollen Lees, Exiles of Erin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979), p. 45. Percy Bysshe Shelley, An Address to the Irish People (Dublin: 1812), p. 19. Annual Register 53 (1811), 52. ‘Many years ago’, as Thomas De Quincey recorded in the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (London: Taylor, 1822), ‘when I was looking over Piranesi’s Antiquities of Rome, Mr. Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by that artist, called his Dreams, and which record the scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a fever’. Coleridge’s ‘emblem of philanthropic justice’ (reprinted in EOT (CC), II, p. 268) may be usefully compared with the monstrous emblems of the French Republic,

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which were prolific in the early to mid-1790s. See, for example, the engravings Philosophy Run Mad by Thomas Rowlandson (London, 1792), A Peace Offering to the Genius of Liberty and Equality by Issac Cruikshank (London: Fores, 1794) and The Genius of France Triumphant by James Gillray (London: Humphrey, 1795). Quarterly Review 16 (1817), 528. According to Hill Shine’s The Quarterly Review Under Gifford: Identification of Contributors 1809–1824 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1949), p. 55. Annual Register 58 (1817), iv–v. See Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, II, pp. 27, 491. Richard Burke died on 2 August 1794, less than three years before his father’s own death. Refer to Edmund Burke’s Speeches . . . in the House of Commons, 4 vols (London: Longman, 1816), I, p. v. Edinburgh Review 27 (1816), 247. Ibid. 28 (1817), 505. Ibid. 27 (1816), 247. Nicholas Robinson, Life in Caricature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 194. See especially Cincinnatus in Retirement (BM Satires 6026), A Learned Coalition (private collection), and Robinson’s commentary on them in the Life in Caricature, pp. 40, 48. Edinburgh Review 28 (1817), 504. The quotation is from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Poems on Various Subjects (London: Robinson, 1796), pp. 177–178. According to the footnote William Hazlitt appended to the character sketch of ‘Mr. Burke’ in Political Essays, with Sketches of Public Characters (London: Hone, 1819), p. 361. The sonorous sketch, first published in 1807, makes an interesting contrast to the circumspect footnote that was added in 1819.

Chapter 4 1

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According to Walley Chamberlain Oulton, The History of the Theatres of London . . . 1775–1795, 2 vols (London: Martin, 1796), I, p. 133. For a full calendar of the plays that were shown at Drury Lane during the season of 1793–1794, refer to London Stage, V, pp. 1571–1572. An observation I owe to Jonathan Wordsworth’s ‘Introduction’ to The Fall of Robespierre 1794 (Oxford: Woodstock, 1991). The Times, 18 August 1794. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Fall of Robespierre (Cambridge: Lunn, 1794), p. 9. Gregory Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 46. Coleridge, Robespierre, p. 15. George Taylor has remarked upon the similarity between both characters in his recent book on The French Revolution and the London Stage, 1789–1805 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 118–119.

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Sonnet ‘VIII’ was published on 29 December 1794 and ‘XI’ on 29 January 1795. Morning Chronicle, 29 December 1794. I am using John Philip Kemble’s version of Macbeth (London: Lowndes, 1794). Ibid., p. 63. Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 6. Ibid., p. 29. Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, I, p. xix. Charles Dibdin, A Complete History of the English Stage, 5 vols (London: Dibdin, undated), II, pp. 399–400. Noted by Oulton in The History of the Theatres, I, p. 133. The theatre was never finished remaining ‘offensive to the public eye’ for 15 years until its total destruction by fire on the night of 24 February 1809 (London Stage, V, p. 1568). Oulton, The History of the Theatres, II, p. 150. Morning Chronicle, 22 April 1794. As Andrea K. Henderson has noted in Romanticism and the Painful Pleasures of Modern Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 139, ‘devotion to Shakespeare . . . during the French Revolution, was widespread and often nationalistic and conservative in its bearings’. Morning Chronicle, 22 April 1794. Oulton’s point; see The History of the Theatres, II, p. 140. Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, I, pp. xviii–xix. For example, Allardyce Nicoll, A History of English Drama, 2nd ed., 6 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), III, p. 23, London Stage, V, p. 1992, and The Revels History of Drama in English, ed. by Charles Leech, 8 vols (London: Methuen, 1975–1983), VI, p. 110. The Times, 22 April 1794. On the ‘violence of theatregoing in the late eighteenth-century’, refer to Gillian Russell’s The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society, 1793–1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); see especially pp. 16, 107, 112–115. Morning Chronicle, 22 April 1794. Dibdin, A Complete History, III, p. 12. ‘German intrigue, and German subsidies’ were Thomas Paine’s reasons for England’s trade deficit with Europe. See the Rights of Man. Part the Second. Combining Principle and Practice, 8th edn (London: Symonds, 1792), p. 166. Dibdin, A Complete History, III, pp. 12–13. ‘From 1790 on, the defence of political and social privilege was justified as a defence of the culture of the English people, and any such defence would inevitably entail the preservation of Shakespeare, already widely regarded as England’s greatest artist. Indeed, Shakespeare was certain to be further glorified by such a movement’; Gary Taylor’s point in Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (London: Hogarth Press, 1990), p. 149. Quoted from the anonymous Candid and Impartial Strictures on the Performers Belonging to Drury-Lane (London: Martin, 1795), p. 5. In the 1795–1796 season for example, which has a full listing of salaries, the top actors – ‘J P Kemble’, ‘Bannister jun.’, ‘King’ and ‘J. Palmer’ – were on £16-a-week. Compare this with Siddons who was on £31 10s per week, or Jordan on £10 10s a

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night (London Stage, V, pp. 1782–1783). The much higher pay commanded by the leading actresses supports Gillian Russell’s overarching thesis on the predominant maleness of late eighteenth-century theatre audiences, which she uses to argue the circumstance of theatre houses as places for the commodification of women. Refer to The Theatres of War, p. 107; see also Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 12. Capell Loft on Siddons’ performance of Isabella, a character in The Stranger; The Monthly Mirror 5 (1798), 106. Though Haywood’s Bloody Romanticism draws attention to the theatricality framing representations of violence during the Romantic period (see p. 3, for example), he neglects altogether the ‘bloody vignettes’ that were actually performed on stage. For a description of the scenery refer to The World newspaper, 22 April 1794. There is also a retrospective assessment of Capon’s work in James Boaden’s Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1825), II, pp. 101–103. The Times, 22 April 1794. Ibid., p. 4. Morning Chronicle, 22 April 1794. The full text is in Richard Fitzpatrick’s The Occasional Prologue (London: Lowndes, 1794), pp. 2–4. Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism, 1730–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 3. ‘The issue of the value accorded to Shakespeare’s works cannot be disentangled from the values that people have found within those works’; Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare, p. 5. The first version is in the Morning Chronicle of 29 January 1795; for the second version refer to Coleridge’s Poems on Various Subjects, pp. 50, 179–180 footnote 3. It was the most frequently performed play in London (see Figure 4.2). First published in the Morning Chronicle, 26 December 1794; for the second version see Coleridge, Poems on Various Subjects, p. 45. See Dibdin, A Complete History, III, p. 12. Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, I, p. xix. Coleridge’s ‘Tragedy complete and neatly transcribed’ was sent to Bowles on 16 October 1797 (CL, I, p. 335). Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 8th edn (London: Dodsley, 1776), pp. 203–204. ‘Burke’, Henderson has rightly noted, ‘takes for granted that nothing can please us without being subject to us; the possibility of a mutually beneficial equality of power or even a chance coincidence of interests is not even thinkable here. One is either subject to power and therefore experiences sublime pain, or one subjects another to one’s own power and thereby experiences beautiful pleasure’. Coleridge’s Alhadra, who is both victim and victimizer (of Osorio, politically the most powerful person in the play), is the quintessential representation of how ‘beauty and sublimity’ came to ‘coexist in a woman’ in the 1790s. See Romanticism, pp. 157–160. Nicoll, History of English Drama, III, pp. 39–40.

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75 76

Notes

Refer to Jonathan Wordsworth’s ‘Introduction’ to The Iron Chest 1796 (Oxford: Woodstock books, 1989). See George Colman jun., The Iron Chest, 2nd ed. (London: Cadell, 1796), p. xvii. As pointed out by the ‘Introduction’ to The Wheel of Fortune in the John Philip Kemble Promptbooks, ed. Charles H. Shattuck, 11 vols (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1974), XI, p. i. Taken from the popular English translation entitled The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau . . . to which are added, The Reveries of a Solitary Walker, 3rd edn, 2 vols (London: Robinson, 1796), II, p. 195. I am using Robert Osborn’s ‘Early Version (1797-1799)’ of Wordsworth’s The Borderers (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 74. Cf. Figure 4.2. Shakespeare, Macbeth, p. 58. The Monthly Mirror 4 (1797), 297–298. Shakespeare, Macbeth, pp. 42–43. Refer to her closing speech (PW (CC), III, p. 148). Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poems, pp. 140–141. A sentiment he sensationally conveyed in The Morning Post, 24 February 1798 (see EOT (CC), I, pp. 20–23). I am using The Grecian Daughter in Bell’s British Theatre, ed. John Bell, 34 vols (London: Cawthorn, 1797), because the line is omitted in the later version published by Inchbald (i.e. in BT). The quote is from IV, p. 73. Anonymous, Candid and Impartial Strictures, pp. 32–33. Anonymous, The Unsex’d Females: A Poem (London: Cadell, 1798), pp. 9–10. ‘Women’s violence transgresses the boundaries that establish both sex and gender like no other act can – not only are such women not properly feminine, but they cease to be female. Women’s violence was for many the most shocking of all the French revolution’s bloody excesses, simply because the actors were women . . . In exploring . . . representations of such violent women, we need to avoid two dangers of interpretation. The first is that these images of aggressive women represent and celebrate unbridled female agency and power. The second, equally dangerous position is that these images of aggressive women are simply products of male misogyny . . . Each perspective is insufficient, but together they produce a constructive tension’; Adriana Craciun, Fatal Women of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 47. Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, I, p. xix. From Ann Radcliffe, The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents, 3 vols (London: Cadell, 1797), II, p. 112. Ibid., II, pp. 285–286. Radcliffe delineated the character of Schedoni in Ibid., I, pp. 101–104. Noted by E. J. Clery in The Rise of Supernatural Fiction 1762–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 108. Anonymous, Candid and Impartial Strictures, pp. 12–13. For evidence of the appeal of a comic actress (Elizabeth Farren), even over Siddons, refer to the review on The Force of Ridicule by The Morning Chronicle, 30 November 1796. That is, since Hannah More’s Percy of 1777. In the three years leading up to the writing of Osorio. Extrapolated from the London Stage, V, pp. 1678–1679, 1781–1782, 1887–1888.

Notes 77

78 79

80 81

82

83

84

85

86 87

88 89

90 91

92 93

94 95 96 97 98

99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106

161

For the circumstances surrounding the production of Vortigern refer to Bernard Grebanier’s The Great Shakespeare Forgery (London: Heinemann, 1966). The Times, 4 April 1796. There were no new tragedies at Drury Lane for the winter season of 1797–1798. In contrast the same period saw the production of three tragedies by Shakespeare, which ran a total of 18 nights. The Times, 14 December 1812. Benjamin Wyatt, Observations on the Design for the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane (London: Taylor, 1813), p. 2. Walley Chamberlane Oulton, The History of the Theatres of London . . . from the Year 1795 to 1817 Inclusive, 3 vols (London: Chapple, 1818), see I, pp. 228–231. See The Morning Chronicle, 18 September 1812, The Times, 12 October 1812, and The Courier, 3 September 1812. Richard Landsdown has a useful summary of the prerogatives of Whitbread’s leadership in Byron’s Historical Dramas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 16. Lord Byron, English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers, 4th edn (London: Cawthorn, 1811), pp. 44–46. The Examiner, 31 January 1813. Its specific words: ‘a courtier and a follower of SPENCER PARCEVAL [sic]’. The Examiner, 25 November 1810. Morning Chronicle, 20 January 1813. On 28 September 1812: ‘Mr. Whitbread reported that he had received a Tragedy from Mr Coleridge under the Title of “Remorse” which he had read with great satisfaction’ (Minutes, Garrick Club Library); PW (CC), III, p. 1028. The Assignation itself has a Spanish location. ‘TIME – The reign of Philip the Second, at the close of the civil war against the Moors and during the heat of the persecution which raged against them, shortly after the Edict which forbade the wearing of Moresco apparel, under pain of Death’, states the playbill advertising the first performance of Remorse (see Figure 4.3). The Morning Chronicle and The Courier, 25 January 1813. John Russell Stephens, The Profession of the Playwright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 143. According to Mays (PW (CC), III, p. 1049). The Morning Chronicle and The Courier, 25 January 1813. The Satirist 12 (1813), 189. Ibid., 191. I am using the first published edition of Remorse (London: Pople, 1813). Unless otherwise stated, all references to Remorse in Section 4.2 are to the first published edition. CL, III, p. 426: to Daniel Stuart, 22 December 1812. The Monthly Mirror 6 (1798), 106. The Theatrical Inquisitor 2 (1813), 116. The Courier, 25 January 1813. The Times, 7 December 1812. The Morning Chronicle, 2 December 1812. Ibid., 15 February 1814. She was 29 at the time of Remorse, and had yet to experience her first relationship (DNB, I, pp. 1256–1257).

162 107 108

109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116

117 118 119

120 121

122 123

124 125 126 127

128

129

130

Notes

The Theatrical Inquisitor 2 (1813), 116. Respectively: Isabella in The Fatal Marriage, performed four times; Belvidera in Venice Preserved, twice; the eponymous heroine of Jane Shore, three times; and the female half of Romeo and Juliet, her most popular stock character, whom she performed six times. Or from 198 lines in Maria to 290 in Teresa. Coleridge, Remorse, p. 37. Ibid., pp. 38–45. Ibid., p. 41. Ibid., p. 63. Ibid., pp. 63–64. The Courier, 21 December 1812. She was on a £14-per-week pay in the 1813–1814 season; Smith commanded the highest terms, at £25. For more information, refer to the pay list enclosed in the James Winston collection of playbills with the British Library (C.120.h1). Albert involves 320 lines of dialogue, Alvar, 456. Coleridge, Remorse, p. 3. Anon. [Leigh Hunt], Critical Essays on the Performers of the London Theatres (London: Hunt, 1807), pp. 185–186, 200. As Henderson has observed, Joanna Baillie, the leading writer of tragedy, ‘argued [in 1812] that small theatres were best because . . . actors [could] “ . . . enter [more] thoroughly into the characters they represented, and to express in their faces that variety of fine fleeting emotion which nature in moments of agitation assumes”’; refer to Romanticism, p. 135. The fact that this type of stage action could be appreciated at Drury Lane – that is, in Elliston – is indicative, I think, of Wyatt’s success at providing audiences at Drury Lane with ‘DISTINCT SOUND and VISION’. The Theatrical Inquisitor 2 (1813), 64. The best the ‘predetermined Plauditors’ in the press (The Courier and The Morning Chronicle) could do for Elliston was a single sentence of compliments (‘Mr. ELLISTON’s representation of Don Alvar preserved a tone of solemn and impressive dignity, suited to the elevation of the character’). The Theatrical Inquisitor 2 (1813), 135. Ibid., 136. Elliston was famous for his broad repertory, being equally capable at tragedy and comedy. For an indication of ‘the distribution of roles at Drury Lane’, refer to Joseph Donohue, Theatre in the Age of Kean (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975), pp. 76–77. The Theatrical Inquisitor 2 (1813), 136. The Times, 25 January 1813. Oulton’s assessment, see The History of the Theatres, I, p. 255. Remorse was revived on 18 October 1813, and on two further occasions in April 1817, to dismal takings at the box office (PW (CC), III, p. 1042). Also clearly Mays’ approach; see ‘The Limits of Success’ in PW (CC), III, pp. 1048–1051. Michael Kelly, Reminiscences . . . of the King’s Theatre, and Theatre Royal Drury Lane (New York: Collins, 1826), p. 373. The British Review 4 (1813), 361.

Notes 131

132

133

134 135 136 137

138 139

140

141 142 143 144

145

146 147

163

Charles Lamb, ‘On Garrick and acting’; in The Reflector, ed. Leigh Hunt, 2 vols (London: Hunt, 1812), II, p. 308. In ‘Discovering the Theatre’, for example, Ionesco asserted that he was totally opposed to the actor ‘changing skins – the actor identifying totally with his role’. Tulane Drama Review 4 (1959), 6. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Remorse, 2nd edn (London, Pople, 1813), p. v. Unless otherwise stated, all references to Remorse in Section 4.3 are to the second published edition. Ibid., p. iv. Lamb, The Reflector, II, p. 299. Ibid., p. 300. J. L. Styan, Drama, Stage, and Audience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 6–7. Coleridge, Remorse, p. vi. The number of lines is 195 if one includes the ‘APPENDIX’, but Coleridge’s accompanying commentary makes it amply clear that he considered the additional material enclosed therein to be ‘unfit for the Stage’; Ibid., p. 75. Refer to Henry Crabb Robinson’s diary entry for 23 January 1813, On Books and their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley, 3 vols (London: J. M. Dent, 1938), I, p. 117. Coleridge, Remorse, p. 25. Ibid., p. 58. Ibid., pp. iv–v. Mays has ‘28–29 Jan’ as the soonest probable release date for the first edition (PW (CC), III, p. 1229). ‘Mr. PERCEVAL was entering the Lobby of the House of Commons, where a number of persons were standing, when a man . . . drew out a small pistol, and shot [him] . . . The deed was perpetrated so suddenly, that the man who fired the pistol was not instantly recognized by those in the lobby’; The Times, 12 May 1812. Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections (London: Harper Collins, 1998), p. 308. His reaction to the climax of the play has prompted two explanations. Cf. Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections, p. 326 and PW (CC), III, pp. 1204–1206.

Conclusion 1

2 3 4

Marilyn Butler’s Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), for example, has ‘the all-important Dissenting interest . . . driven into the loyalist camp . . . in 1797–8, the fiercest year of the English counterrevolutionary reaction’, see pp. 79, 83. Noticed by David Erdman (EOT (CC), I, p. lxxxiii). His principal adversary was, of course, William Hazlitt. Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 500–502.

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Index

Abrams, Meyer Howard 4 Adam, William 65–6 Addington, Henry 101 Africa 57 agricultural revolution see land enclosure under England Allsop, Thomas 59, 64 America 47, 81, 82 war with England 47, 87–8 yellow fever epidemics 56 Americas, the 50, 56 antiquarianism 62, 76–7 Arthy, Elliot 52, 55, 56 atheism see and atheism under Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Barbauld, Anna Laetitia 43, 71, 72–3 Works: Eighteen Hundred and Eleven 87–8 Barrell, John 22, 33 Bate, Jonathan 105, 110 Beattie, James 85 Blane, Gilbert 51, 52, 56, 57 Bloomfield, Robert 77–8 Bossy, John 31, 35 Boswell, James 49, 99 Bowles, William Lisle 64, 111, 113 Boydell Shakespeare Gallery 84–5 Brothers, Richard 65 Burdett, Francis 86, 87, 89, 95 Bürger, Gottfried August 66, 67 Burke, Edmund 96, 99–102, 139 Works: A Philosophical Enquiry 101, 112 Byron, (Lord) George Gordon 74, 79, 122–3, 141, 142

Castlereagh, (Viscount) Robert Stewart 93–4 Catholics 27, 32, 35–6, 89, 99 émigré priests 33 Relief Act of 1791 33, 95 Relief Act of 1829 41 and Unitarians 27, 31 Challoner, Richard 33 Cibber, Colley 128 class conflict 107–8 Classicism see and neo-Classicism under Romanticism closet drama see mental theatre Cobbett, William 86, 89 Coleridge, Ernest Hartley 1, 5 Coleridge, Henry Nelson 44, 71, 72 Coleridge, George 16, 18, 23 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 1, 12–15, 71–3 and Anglicanism 82–6, 89, 98 and atheism 23–5, 84, 98 and Catholicism 27, 31, 33–7, 41, 89–94, 96, 98 conservatism 89, 138–40 demonstrating patriotism 20–2 on fancy 43 in Germany 31–2 on the imagination 42–4 influence over the press 124–7 interest in the theatre 103, 104, 105 in Malta and Italy 34–6 on miracles 33–4, 36 obscurity 76, 96–7 as pantisocrat 81, 82 as plagiarist 44–5 political recantation 18, 88, 90, 101, 102, 138–40

174

Index

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (Cont’d) as radical 16, 27, 74–5, 79, 138 as reviser 1, 4, 37, 40–1, 127, 133, 139–41 on the Supernatural 42, 44 and Unitarianism 27, 36–7 and the Whigs 123–6 and Wordsworth 59–64 Works: Aids 39–41 ‘allegoric vision’ see ‘Superstition, Religion, Atheism’ ‘The Ancient Mariner’ 42–79, 114, 138, 140, 141 Biographia Literaria 42–4, 74–5, 99–100, 101 Christabel 60, 62–3, 74, 75, 77, 78, 97 ‘The Dungeon’ 50 The Fall of Robespierre 59, 103–4, 105 Fears in Solitude 16, 18–19, 22–3, 27 ‘Fears in Solitude’ 20, 21–3, 140 ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’ 74, 75, 78 ‘France, an Ode’ 18, 20, 21, 22–3, 26, 27, 140 The Friend 96, 101 ‘Frost at Midnight’ 19, 22–34, 37–41, 138, 140 Lay Sermon … On the Existing Distresses and Discontents 97, 98, 99 Osorio 103–21, 127, 137 ‘Religious Musings’ 117 Remorse 123–37, 138, 139–41 Sibylline Leaves 74–5 The Statesman’s Manual 97 ‘Superstition, Religion, Atheism’ 82–102, 138, 139, 141 ‘To a Young Ass’ 20–1 ‘VIII. Mrs. Siddons’ 104, 110 ‘XI. To Richard Brinsley Sheridan’ 104, 110–11 Colman, George, the Younger 107, 109, 110 Works: The Iron Chest 113

Cottle, Joseph 60, 61, 62 Cowper, William 24, 39 Crossfield, Robert Thomas 65–6 Cruikshank, Issac 98 Cumberland, Richard 113 Works: The Wheel of Fortune 113–14, 115, 116, 117 De Quincey, Thomas 44 deconstruction 8, 10 Dent, William 101–2 Dibdin, Charles 106, 108, 111 Dillon, John Joseph 91 disease 47–8, 50–1, 56 leprosy 51–2 malaria 54–5 plague 52, 56 rabies 56 scurvy 52 smallpox 56 typhus 47, 52–3 yellow fever 52–7 Dissent see Unitarianism under reform movement dramaturgy 107, 121–2 naturalism 107 reforming the stage 121–3 spectacle 107–8, 123 Drury Lane 103, 109, 113, 132, 141 legacy of Shakespeare 106–10, 121 size 107, 122 technology 109–10 editorial practice 1–10 Elliston, Robert William 130–2, 133 England 20, 108, 110, 120–1 civil unrest 20, 73–4, 82, 86–8, 139 Corn Law 73–4, 79 discharged men 54 economic depression 73, 87 fear of invasion 23, 27, 86–7 industrial revolution 33 Irish immigration 33, 94–5 land enclosure 86

Index mutinies at the Nore and Spithead 48–50 nationalism 69, 107, 108–10 post-Napoleon 73–4, 75, 99, 100 Quota Acts of 1795 47–9 urban culture 67, 107–8 war with America 47, 87–8 war with France 47, 49, 55, 58, 69, 73–4 English see England English radicals see reform movement enthusiasm see enthusiasts under reform movement Erdman, David 97 Everest, Kelvin 4 Farren, Elizabeth 109 Fell, Ralph 63 Feminism see women’s rights under human rights issues Fitzpatrick, Richard 106, 108 Fletcher, Charles 50 Fox, Charles James 31, 89, 100–1 France 20, 85–6, 108 and atheism 23–4, 93–4, 95 and Ireland 24, 27, 92–4 religious persecution 32–3 French revolution 20, 101, 104, 117, 138–9 human cost 21, 118 ideals 20 war 32–3, 47, 49, 69 Freud, Sigmund 11, 14 Fuseli, Henry 84–5, 107 George III, William Frederick 65, 88, 91 George IV, Augustus Frederick 88, 99, 100 German style see gothic supernaturalism Gibbon, Edward 79 Gillray, James 16, 21, 98 Glover, Julia 130, 131, 132 gothic supernaturalism 62, 63, 66–70, 75–6, 108, 111–13, 118–19 Grattan, Henry 89, 92

Hall, Robert 81–2, 85–6 Hardy, Henry 65 Hazlitt, William 97, 100, 102, 114 historicism 3–4, 6, 8–15, 43–5, 71, 141–2 acts of reading 4, 8–10, 15 antiquarian sources 9, 10–11, 15 cultural materialism 8–9, 11 facsimile reprints 9 interrogating ‘the frame’ 8–10 my methodology 10–15, 141–2 privileging first editions 4, 15 textual relativism 6 virtual books 9 Holland, Henry 110 House, Humphrey 71–2 Howard, John 46–7, 50, 51, 52 human rights issues 20 civil liberty 27 pacifism 20 prisoner’s rights 46–7, 117 religious toleration 27, 31, 33, 95 women’s rights 118 working conditions of navy personnel 47–51, 58 impressment see press-ganging inalienable rights see human rights issues Inchbald, Elizabeth 113, 114, 116 independence movement 35, 92 people of 94 rebellion 27 intentionality 1–11 authorial intention 3, 6, 11 critical intention 1, 10 editorial intention 1–10 Ionesco, Eugene 133 Ireland 24, 90, 95–6, 99 Catholic Emancipation 91–6 and France 27, 92–4 Ireland, William Henry 121 Irish see Ireland Jameson, Fredric 8 Jeffrey, Francis 76, 77

175

176

Johnson, Joseph 18, 47, 60 Johnson, Samuel 49, 99 Jordan, Dorothy 103, 109 Keane, Patrick J. 70, 72 Kelly, Michael 114 Kemble, John Philip 107, 108, 121, 131, 133 as Hamlet 134 as Macbeth 109, 115 as Mortimer, (Sir) Edward 113 as Penruddock 113–14, 115, 116 Lamb, Charles 44, 63, 133–4 land enclosure movement see land enclosure under England Lapp, Robert Keith 8 Leader, Zachary 5, 6–7 Lewis, Mathew Gregory 66, 111 Lind, James 47, 50 Liu, Alan 8, 141–2 Lowes, John Livingstone 43, 44 liberalism see ideals under French revolution Lloyd, Charles 65 London 49, 95 dystopian visions of 87–8 rioting 73, 87 Thames, the 49 theatres 105, 107–8, 113, 120–1, 141 Longman, Thomas 59, 61, 64, 99 loyalist movement 82, 88–9 Magnuson, Paul 4, 8 Malays see against Malays under racism Maturin, Charles Robert 124, 125 Mays, J. C. C. 1–3, 4, 5, 7–8, 11 on Coleridge’s Remorse 134–5, 136, 137 McGann, Jerome J. 4, 6, 70 Mee, Jon 22 mental theatre 132–5 Miall, David 28 Middle Easterner 117, 136, 137 Milner, John 32, 92, 94 Milton, John 46, 67, 69 miracles 32–4, 67–8

Index mob violence 73, 87 Church-and-King riots 82, 88 food riots 82 Moor see Middle Easterner Moore, Thomas 88, 92 multiple texts see textual pluralism mutiny 48–50 Napoleon I, Bonaparte 32, 87, 92, 99, 101 Near East see Middle Easterner O’Connor, Arthur 86, 92 O’Connor, Roger 86, 92 Oulton, Walley Chamberlain 106–7, 122 Paine, Thomas 21, 90 ‘paratext’ see interrogating ‘the frame’ under historicism Parker, Richard 49–50 Parrish, Maxfield Parrish 4 patriotism 20, 69, 81 anti-Jacobinism 28, 118 bardolatory 108–10 Perceval, Spencer 88–9, 90, 137, 140 Piranesi, Giambattista 98 Pitt, William, the Younger 75, 91, 100–1 political reformers see reform movement Polwhele, Richard 118 Poole, Thomas 62 Pop-Gun Plot, the 65 press-ganging 48–9, 58 Priestley, Joseph 82, 83 Prince of Wales see George IV quarantine 51 racial discrimination see racism racism anti-Anglicism 20 anti-Gallicism 20, 118 anti-Irish 92–5 anti-Malay 94 Radcliffe, Ann 111, 119–20 radicals see reform movement

Index Rae, Alexander 131–2 reader reception 13, 15 reviewers 13, 62–3, 68 reform movement 20, 22, 31, 89, 99, 102 enthusiasts 21 feminists 118 and Methodism 79 and Unitarianism 27, 82 and Whiggism 31 religious dissenters see Unitarianism under reform movement reviews see reviewers under reader reception revision 3, 70–1, 135–7 revisionism 38, 40–1, 43–5, 75, 78, 87–8, 140–2 revolution see French revolution Reynolds, Joshua 80, 83, 85 rights see human rights issues Robespierre, Maximilien 103–4 Robinson, Henry Crabb 135 Robinson, Mary 111 Romanticism 2, 6, 133 and antiquarianism 76–7 and fatalism 2, 87–8 and misanthropy 114–15 and neo-Classicism 77, 83, 88 and pastoralism 80–1, 86 and Shakespeare 84–5, 105, 110, 114–15, 121 and urbanisation 95, 107 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 114 Schillingsburg, Peter 5 Scotland 76–7, 85–6 Scott, Walter 76–7 Shakespeare, William 67, 69, 110 bardolatry 105, 106–10, 121, 133 Works: Hamlet 105, 114, 134 King Lear 114, 133 Macbeth 69, 104–10, 115–16, 118–21 Othello 114, 134 Richard III 128 Romeo and Juliet 114, 129–30 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 95

177

Shelvocke, George 44, 55–6 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 104, 110–11, 122 Works: The School for Scandal 111, 113 Siddons, Sarah 103, 110, 113, 127, 133 as Euphrasia 118 as Lady Macbeth 104, 109, 118 Slave Trade, the, see slavery Slavery 55, 89, 90 Smith Sarah 127–30, 132, 133, 136, 137 Southey, Robert 16, 59, 68, 82 anti-Catholicism 98 deriding ‘The Ancient Mariner’ 62, 63 on The Friend 96–7 Works: ‘Botany-bay Eclogues’ 57–8 The Fall of Robespierre 59, 103–4, 105 ‘To Horror’ 57 ‘To the Genius of Africa’ 57 Spain 117, 124 Stillinger, Jack 4–6, 7, 8–9, 10, 15 Stuart, Daniel 61 Sultana, Donald 34–5 superstitious seamen 58–9, 64–6 sympathy 24–5 Test Acts, the 27, 31, 35, 83, 91 textual authority 3–8, 134–5, 137 textual pluralism 3–8, 70–3, 137, 141–2 textual primitivism 4, 15 Thompson, Edward 88 Thomson, James 80–1 Thorpe, James 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 Tory government, the 16, 88, 100 political repression 18, 20, 74, 95–6, 99, 138–9 propaganda 19–21, 26–7, 87–8, 89, 90, 94, 95–6 Trotter, Thomas 53 Unitarian religion see and Unitarianism under reform movement Wallen, Martin 5 war 53–4, 55 yellow fever epidemics 53–4, 55, 57

178

Index

Wedgwood, Josiah 60–1, 139 Wedgwood, Thomas 60–1 West Indies 52, 90 independence movement 55 rebellion 55 Sugar Trade, the 55 Whig opposition, the 88 and the legacy of Edmund Burke 100 and the London stage 106–7, 122–6, 141 Whitbread, Samuel 122, 123 White, Reginald 98, 99 white-on-white racism see racism Williams, Raymond 11 Winter, James 65–6 Wollstonecraft, Mary 24, 118 Wordsworth, Dorothy 42, 60, 61 Wordsworth, William 5, 44, 55–6, 74, 140 and gothic supernaturalism 66–7 pandering to market forces 62–4, 66

taking over the Lyrical Ballads 60–2, 64 Works: The Borderers 114 ‘The Convict’ 46, 50 ‘The Female Vagrant’ 50, 114 ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’ 66, 67–8 ‘Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree’ 114 Lyrical Ballads 16, 59–62, 64 ‘Old Man Travelling’ 50 ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads (1800) 66–7, 105, 106, 107–8, 111, 118 ‘The Ruined Cottage’ 24 ‘The Thorn’ 66 ‘Tintern Abbey’ 66, 69 Young, Arthur 94 Zeller, Hans 3–4, 6, 7, 8

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In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

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