University of Virginia Library

III

This early form of the essay was revised by Coleridge for his lecture before the Royal Society of Literature in 1825. A comparison of the manuscript with the printed lecture reveals that the text of the personal essay formed the basis of the public lecture and that this second and final form of the essay incorporated most of the holograph revisions in the Duke manuscript. Not only did almost all of these alterations turn up in the text of the lecture, but the undeleted text of the essay also became part of the text of 1825. One would not wish to have to argue in each of these cases of agreement between the substantive readings of the manuscript and of the lecture that the lecture's reading originated independently of the very same form in the manuscript. When Coleridge stated at the end of the lecture that he could "trace the persecutions, wanderings, and migrations of the Io, the mundane religion" in a "future communication," he was no doubt thinking of the passage on this very subject in the unpublished part of his earlier text.[15] Both the lecture and the holograph revisions in the manuscript terminate at the end of the tenth section. It may even have been the relatively extensive personal reference to Hartley in the first sentences of the following section which made Coleridge decide to put a stop to his discourse at this point. In short, there is every reason to believe that Coleridge revised the initial text of the manuscript and then made it the main body of his lecture for the Royal Society of Literature, and the utter lack of evidence of Coleridge's attention to the essay at any time other than during the composition of it and the use of it for the lecture obliges us to conclude that the revision was undertaken specifically for the purpose of the lecture.

Two distinct stages of revision in the manuscript can be identified. Most of the alterations are in a dark ink, and these occur on folios 1 verso through 11 recto. Some alterations in pencil followed these on a few pages (folios 2 verso through 4 recto, 9 recto, and 11 recto). Of this order there is one piece of evidence that alone practically constitutes demonstration. It involves the only instance of revision in which the very same change has been made in both ink and pencil. On folio 2 verso, Coleridge in ink has

mended a 't' to a 'T', but in doing so he has not made the new inscription very legible; at the same place he has satisfactorily traced another 'T' in pencil. Evidently Coleridge thought the inscription in ink not sufficiently clear and therefore sought to improve it by retracing it. Fortunately, the inference that the alterations in ink were made before those in pencil is supported by other evidence in the manuscript. For example, in one case considerable alteration in pencil is interrupted at a passage which has been deleted during revision in ink, and in another certain elements of a passage have been altered in ink, and the whole passage, specifically including some of these alterations, has later been marked in pencil for revision.[16]

In addition to the revisions contained in the manuscript itself, more extensive alterations and new passages must have been written out on other sheets and combined with the revised manuscript text in a fair copy which was turned over to the Royal Society of Literature. Coleridge had accepted appointment to the Society in March 1824, but he apparently did most of the work on the lecture in early 1825. On 8 April he was busy with the text but envisioning completion of his task, and two and one half weeks later he was finished (Unpublished Letters, 333, 345, 346; Letters, II, 737-738). Delightedly aware of its difficulties, he delivered the lecture on 18 May 1825 (see Unpublished Letters, 351; Letters, II, 739-740).

It has long been thought that the lecture was printed at this time and that at least one copy of this earliest edition survived. These suppositions are based on T. J. Wise's statement in A Bibliography of the Writings in Prose and Verse of Samuel Taylor Coleridge that a "Private Edition was printed and circulated in the customary manner, in advance of the reading" and upon his description of a copy of that "Edition" once in his possession and now in the British Museum. According to Wise, only twenty-five copies were printed.[17] No external evidence has ever been advanced to support Wise's assertion.[18] But internal evidence gained by collating the issue of the lecture described by Wise as a "Private Edition" and the alternate issue of the lecture in the Society's Transactions (1834) proves that Wise's statement is false.[19]

Collation of the two issues of the lecture on the Hinman Collating Machine revealed, first of all, the fact that the pages throughout the lecture

were printed from the same setting of type. In addition, I noted a number of aberrations such as would only arise from broken or worn type, and I found no textual variants. These findings clearly can lead to only one conclusion: the two issues of the lecture, printed from the same type setting, are distinct and distinguishable impressions and issues of the same edition printed contemporaneously. The Yale copy of the lecture (as well as Wise's description of this issue) reveals that the essay was at one point printed as a discrete unit, beginning with B1 and continuing through D3 (quarto); on the other hand, when issued in the Society's Transactions, the essay began on 3C2 verso and ended on 3E4 verso. Since the lecture was printed from variant impositions, standing type — and not stereotype plates — must have been used in printing the second issue. It is, of course, preposterous to assume that the type of this lecture was kept standing over a period of eight years. Hence we must conclude that both issues of the lecture were set up and printed in early 1834.

There is really no evidence for any further conclusions, such as the order of these issues through the press. Aberrations of the kind referred to above are almost all identical, and those few that vary in one edition or the other constitute conflicting evidence supporting one order of printing as much as the other. Of course, it might be argued that the lack of evidence of deterioration itself tends to point to the "Private Edition" of twenty copies as the one with priority, but such negative evidence is of a low order of probability indeed and fortunately does not have to bear any textual weight, since there are no textual variants at stake. All we can say is that one issue, possibly the private one, was set up and printed not earlier than the first months of 1834 and that thereupon the type pages were re-imposed to print the lecture for alternate issue.

The details of the composing, transcribing, revising, and printing of Coleridge's lecture are now before us, and the complete essay in its early form has now been recovered. We have traced the essay from Coleridge's composition in May 1821 for Hartley, through J. H. Green's transcription in Notebook 29 and his or Coleridge's oversight of folios 118 and 117 when extracting the Duke leaves, to Coleridge's revision of this bound "small volume" in 1825 for his Royal Society of Literature lecture. The printing of the lecture in 1834 closes the history of the producing of the essay in its authoritative forms, and there now remains the task of editing the authoritative documents for publication. When publication of both versions appears, it should allow us to view one of our great nineteenth-century writers developing an idea over a span of years, explicating and revising his explication of one of his favorite topics, the Prometheus myth.