University of Virginia Library

Some thirty years ago Sir Edmund Chambers conjectured that Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 1825 lecture on Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound included material prepared in 1821 for his son Hartley.[1] To support his conjecture, Chambers referred to the substantial, but inconclusive, external evidence of the letters of 16 May 1821, 26 April 1825, and 19 May 1825.[2] Yet, documents recently brought to light make Chambers' reasonable guess convincing indeed, and it is the purpose of this article to show that the 1821 transcription of the essay originally written for Hartley was revised by Coleridge in 1825, and is the chief ancestor of the text of the 1825 lecture published in the Royal Society of Literature's Transactions and later in Coleridge's Literary Remains.

The evidence consists of two manuscript fragments, one of thirteen leaves and the other of two. The first of these, now in the Duke University Library, has hitherto been catalogued as "a collection of MS. notes on philosophical subjects by S. T. Coleridge"; the second fragment is two leaves of Notebook 29, otherwise known as the "Clasped Vellum Notebook," now in the Berg Collection of The New York Public Library. The thirteen leaves at Duke and the two leaves in New York apparently were once together in Notebook 29, and reunited they contain the complete text of the essay as it was prepared for Hartley in 1821.

The Duke manuscript contains not only the major part of the essay in its early form but also the revisions made by Coleridge for his lecture in 1825. Its thirteen leaves are gathered in quires of two (conjugate) leaves each; thus the manuscript is constituted of six gatherings plus a disjunct leaf, folio 1. The watermark reads eads & pine 1802. The leaves, unnumbered, are roughly bound in a coarse brown paper. According to the records of the library's manuscript division, they arrived at Duke in this wrapper when the manuscript was purchased; this information is verified by the fact that mathematic equations which appear on the wrapper in Coleridge's hand were included in the prefatory remarks which he wrote for the 1825 lecture.[3] Folio 1 recto contains the words 'Mr John Anster | 30 Thornhaugh

Street | Bedford Square' in Coleridge's hand in the upper right corner.[4] Across the page are the words 'by the Author, S. T. Coleridge' apparently in the hand of Joseph Henry Green, Coleridge's amanuensis.[5] The main text, in Green's hand, begins at the top of folio 1 verso and continues to the bottom of folio 13 verso. The last sentence is incomplete. Revisions in ink and in pencil in Coleridge's hand occur throughout the manuscript up to the last third of folio 11 recto, where a new paragraph in the main text begins. Two other scraps of evidence, both uninformative, deserve mention: one, a sentence about the document on the wrapper in an unidentified hand, and the other, a brief description of the document in the hand of J. Dykes Campbell on a separate sheet that has been kept with the manuscript.

Inscribed in Green's hand upon two leaves of Notebook 29 in the Berg Collection of The New York Public Library is the remainder of the essay. This notebook was kept by Coleridge from 1814 to 1825, according to the Berg Collection's records. As customarily, Coleridge turned the book around when he had filled about half its pages, and consequently the text in question begins at the top of folio 118 verso with a fragment of a sentence, continues on 118 recto, and ends at the bottom of 117 verso. There is no inscription on these pages in any hand but Green's.