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Publication in Studies in Bibliography, XI (1958), 143-162 of a chronological report, by David V. Erdman, of uncollected variant readings and occurrences of Coleridge's verse in British newspapers has elicited a good deal of helpful response from the Coleridgeans of three countries. Professor J. R. MacGillivray has come forward with a discovery that pushes back the date of the first known Coleridge publication from 1793 to 1790, and subsequently Mrs. Lucyle Werkmeister has located another appearance of the same poem even five days earlier. Mrs. Werkmeister (whose research at the British Museum was supported by a grant from the Johnson Fund, American Philosophical Society) has also discovered that the Horne Tooke poem of 1796, destined for the Morning Chronicle but never found there, actually was published in the Telegraph. She is responsible for the new listings of 1794, 1795, and 1797; and she has brought home in triumph a lost Coleridge poem (see January 3, 1798) at the end of a hunt that engaged also Professor Carl Woodring and all the
The limited nature of the original survey, as regards the Courier, was not made quite plain: "all items have been attended to" meant that all poems known to have appeared in the Courier had been collated, not that an exhaustive search of a complete run of that paper had been made. More precisely: exhaustive search had been made of the Courier for the years 1804-1820; of the Morning Post for the years 1797-1804 (except that no papers of January 3, April 5, May 15, or December 8, 1798, have been located); of the Morning Chronicle only for the years 1794-96; and of the Cambridge Intelligencer (with the exception of several missing numbers) for 1792-1803.
An exhaustive survey of the Courier has now been extended to the years 1797-1803 (except for missing issues of February 27, March 16, May 19, June 1, August 15, September 12-14, 1797, and October 20, November 7, 23, December 7, 1798). The Morning Chronicle has been examined up through 1798. And a survey has been made of the few extant copies of the Albion (May 26-December 27, 1800, incomplete; June 29-July 2, 4-10, 1801). Most of the new items from these two surveys are merely reprintings from Coleridge's Poems or his Schiller or the Lyrical Ballads—or the Morning Post. But a peculiar interest attaches to the reprintings in the Courier. After the summer of 1799 (and perhaps secretly much earlier) Daniel Stuart owned both Post and Courier. As the mocking editor of the Albion observed (October 3, 1800), the evening paper was considered but "a supernumerary" of the morning one; puns and paragraphs and verses were often carried over from one to the other. If a text appearing in the Morning Post during Coleridge's contributorship may be considered an authorized text, so may a modification of it appearing in the Courier (see June 21 and August 22, 1800).
It may be noted here that two sonnets itemized in the first list as tentative and possible attributions (January 29 and February 21, 1795) were examined in detail by Mr. Erdman and the first, a Sonnet. To Mrs. Siddons, found to be intimately related to the known work of Coleridge. ("Newspaper Sonnets Put to the Concordance Test: Can They be Attributed to Coleridge?" Bulletin of The New York Public Library, LXI, 508-516, 611-620; LXII, 46-49.)
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