University of Virginia Library

WHILE PURSUING COLERIDGE'S CAREER through the pages of the Cambridge Intelligencer, the Morning Chronicle, the Morning Post, the Monthly Magazine, and the Courier, I have unearthed so many variant readings and unexpected occurrences of verses not hitherto recorded that it has seemed advisable to make all these available in a brief chronological report. To be usefully inclusive I have also collated all the periodical publication of Coleridge's verse up through 1820 (with exceptions to be noted). And in the same list I have taken occasion to notice certain poems not previously collected, though their attribution to Coleridge will require a separate and fairly elaborate demonstration.

To these Professor Robert D. Mayo has enabled me to add a report of two Coleridge poems, "Absence: An Ode" and "Absence: A Poem," which he has recently discovered in the Sherborne Weekly Entertainer of 1793.

The standard Oxford edition, edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge in 1912, of The Complete Poetical Works in two volumes or The Poems in one volume (identical in congruent portions), has all the appearance of a thorough collation, and I trust it may be so for manuscript sources (except in such clearly editorially determined matters as the capitalization or non-capitalization of personifiable nouns). In his preface the editor promises "to furnish the student with an exhaustive summary of various readings," and he defends the supplying of an "exhaustive table of variants" however apparently trifling or accidental. He does indeed record what are intended to be complete newspaper variants whenever the fact of newspaper publication is known to him—with the exception of the Ode to the Rain, supposed to have appeared in an issue of the Morning Post that is missing from the British Museum file. There is a legend, however, that E. H. Coleridge did not do all the newspaper collations himself, and it becomes evident

that whoever assisted him sometimes let him down. Rather considerable variants of some poems have been overlooked, and the report of minor textual variants is especially careless for the earlier part of the period covered. Patent typographical errors (e.g. "freeze" for "breeze") have been emended silently even in the table of supposed variants—with the effect of contradicting Coleridge's statements that certain poems were badly printed. And in at least one instance what purport to be variants from a newspaper seem to be merely compiled from one of the manuscripts. Furthermore the discovery of several poems appearing at dates not noted makes it evident that no systematic examination of the periodical files has ever been made. Anything like an orderly search could hardly have missed the 148-line "Fragment by S. T. Coleridge" of The Visions of the Maid of Orleans, for instance.

It seems to have been a matter of editorial policy to disregard variations in spelling, punctuation, and other mechanics; yet it is disconcerting to find differences in line indention, in spelling ("clothes" for "cloathes," "tease" for "teize"), and capitalization ("Earth" for "earth" or "remorse" for "Remorse") —even in what purport to be separate transcriptions of the text "as first printed in the Morning Post" or in texts derived uniquely from the newspaper printing.

Of rather greater importance is the almost regular neglect of pseudonyms, signatures, or anonymity. Only after the present investigation will it be possible to compile a biography of Coleridge as "Albert," "Laberius," "Cuddy," etc., or variously "S.T.C.," "ESTEESI," and "EΣTHΣE." Again, in the E. H. Coleridge text, the titles actually used in periodical publication are often neglected, or titles are given to poems which had none.

The present tabulation, while not claimed to be without its own errors of transcription, is intended to supply all variants in text, title, and signature (not spelling and mechanics, though these are privately available to anyone contemplating an edition) needed to correct the E. H. Coleridge table of variants of all Coleridge poems printed in periodicals from 1793 through 1820—not including the Watchman, the Friend, the Annual Anthology, or Felix Farley's Bristol Journal. My concern is with poems or versions first published in periodicals and not with mere reprintings, although for the four newspapers carefully surveyed, the Intelligencer, Chronicle, Post, and Courier, all items have been attended to. Thus, with the exceptions just noted, all items in E. H. Coleridge's list No. I of "Poems first published in newspapers or periodicals" and No. II of "Epigrams and jeux d'esprit" (pp. 1178-1180) have been collated. But I have not dealt with his list No. III of

"Poems included in anthologies and other works" (except to make one addition for 1803) nor made any search for reprints in other periodicals or for poems quoted in reviews.

It has seemed advisable, however, to list, even when variants are not involved, the few further newspaper printings mentioned in E. H. Coleridge's notes but not in his lists I and II; also to notice poems not accepted by E. H. Coleridge though assigned to Coleridge by earlier editors.

To bring the record up to date I have added two publications of poems in the Courier and New Times discovered by Professor Thomas M. Raysor in 1930; also a first publication of Genevieve as an "Irregular Sonnet" in the Morning Chronicle and three new epigrams in the Monthly Magazine discovered by Professor Earl Leslie Griggs in 1954.

Undated items which I have not located are: "On a Late Connubial Rupture," said to have been reprinted in Felix Farley's Bristol Journal, and "To a Friend who had declared his intention of writing no more poetry," said to have appeared "in a Bristol newspaper."

Professor Carl R. Woodring, having made an independent collation of most of the newspaper poems, has now checked through the present list and has improved it with several corrections and suggestions.

In the course of this survey it was suggested to me that the possibility of duplicate composition of the newspapers in question must be taken into account, and accordingly I made an effort to collate all extant copies noted in William S. Ward's recent and nearly exhaustive Index and Finding List of Serials Published in the British Isles, 1789-1832 (University of Kentucky Press, 1953). The point is that before the introduction of the steam press in 1814 the rate of printing did not normally exceed 250 impressions an hour, so that there had to be more than one setting of type for a daily newspaper if more copies were needed than could be printed on one press in eight or ten hours, i.e. 2000-2500 copies—or, by halfsheet imposition, 4000-5000 copies.

Presumably the weekly Cambridge Intelligencer (circulation not known) would never have required duplicate setting. And presumably the Morning Chronicle in 1793-1795 and the Morning Post in 1797-1802 (their Coleridge years) would not have required it for their normal circulations. The Morning Post in 1802 boasted that its circulation had risen "from 400 to 2100 per day" between 1795 and 1801 and again "from 2100 to 3500 per day" by December 3, 1802. The circulation of the Morning Chronicle dropped below 2000 in 1802 and had probably not exceeded 3000 in the preceding decade. None of

these figures approaches the critical limit, if halfsheet imposition was practicable. (The Times is said to have used duplicate setting when the circulation exceeded 4500 copies, as it did not do before 1806.) But bibliographical information about the newspapers is so scanty that a thorough check was advised. (I am grateful to Eugene B. Vest and Gerald E. Bentley, Jr. for help with some of the collating.)

Files of the Cambridge Intelligencer in the British Museum (Duke University film), Oxford, and the University of Chicago were collated, leaving unexamined only the file at the Cambridge Public Library. Files of the Morning Chronicle in Oxford, the Boston Public Library (Duke University film), and the University of Chicago were collated, leaving unexamined only one extensive file, the one at Cambridge University. Files of the Morning Post in the British Museum (Duke University film), Oxford, the New York Historical Library, and the Newberry Library in Chicago were examined, leaving only the file which is listed in Ward as at Richmond, Virginia, but cannot now be located.

In all cases the texts examined, in which typographical peculiarities such as broken letters were frequently noted, proved to be identical. The evidence appears conclusive that duplicate composition was not practised by the newspapers concerned at the dates in question. It thus seems safe to conclude that apparent errors in E. H. Coleridge are actual errors and not variants derived from variant printings.

The few poems appearing in the Courier (on eleven scattered days between 1804 and 1818) are with one exception correctly collated by E. H. Coleridge; so the possibility that in the latter half of that period the Courier reached a circulation requiring multiple setting hardly concerns us. I have collated two or three copies for each of the days for which that many copies were available and found no variation, except that the Courier sometimes went into a "Second Edition" with one or two news paragraphs refreshed.

Finally a word should be said about the text of the poems reprinted in 1850 in Sara Coleridge's third volume of Coleridge's Essays on His Own Times. Although she claims to be reprinting these "as they originally appeared," her text is sometimes that of 1817 (Recantation and Parliamentary Oscillators); sometimes a doctored text (in "Hippona" the third line, "Whate'er obscenities you say," becomes "Whate'er men over boldly say"); but usually a text changed only in mechanics (for example The Devil's Thoughts and most of the Epigrams). In spelling and punctuation she is more faithful than E. H. Coleridge to the newspaper, and her text does not seem to account for any of his errors.