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Notes
See the editions of the Biographia edited by J. Shawcross (1907), I, pp. xc-xcii, and by G. Watson (1965), pp. xii-xiv. The introductory materials of 1965 stand unaltered in Watson's recent (1975) reissue of this edition. The introduction to the latter is a reprint, with minor alterations (see n. 15, below), of Professor Watson's 1956 introduction to the Biographia, to which is added a brief "Note (1965)" in response to the arguments advanced by E. L. Griggs in 1959 (see n. 2, below).
Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (1956-1971), IV, 578. Following citations to CL are to this edition.
See Whalley's "The Integrity of the Biographia Literaria" in Essays and Studies, 6 (1953), 85-101.
"Wordsworth and Coleridge on Diction and Figures," English Institute Essays, 1952, ed. Alan S. Downer (1965), pp. 184-185.
This is not to say that Coleridge was not often preoccupied, in the intervening years, with the same concerns he expressed in the Biographia. That his speculations developed over a long period is amply attested to in the latest Notebooks and in Professor Coburn's notes. Commenting on an entry of 1808 which attributes to poetry "the production of [the most del.] as great immediate pleasure in each part, as is compatible with the largest possible Sum of pleasure in the whole," Coburn remarks that "the materials for BL go back a long way, making it what he projected in 1803" (CN, III, 3286 and 3286n.). She crossreferences this 1808 entry with entries of 1811 (cited as "E" in the tabular synopsis above) that Coleridge clearly transported four years later to Chapter XIV. Indeed, Coburn points out scores of correspondences between passages in the Notebooks and in the Biographia. Some of these contain favorite quotations and aphorisms (e.g. CN, III, 3335 and 4248). In only a few cases, however, when quotations appear in the Biographia with omissions and variations parallel to those Coleridge made in entering the passage in an earlier notebook, are there grounds for supposing that he returned to the notebook entry in composing the Biographia (e.g. CN, 3750 and 3537). Other Notebook entries may be said to foreshadow Coleridge's argument in the Biographia. In an 1813 entry, he opposes "Eisenoplasy or esenoplastic Power" to "Fantasy" (CN, 4176). In an 1808 entry, he coins the term "psilosophy" (CN, 3244n.). But, important as such notes are for students of the Biographia, they lie beyond the scope of the present study: here I can deal only with entries in the Notebooks which intentionally adumbrate the Biographia, like the cited note of 1803 (D), or which were almost certainly before Coleridge as he worked on the Biographia in 1815, like the cited notes of 1811 and 1815 (E and P). See notes 20, 21, and 22 below.
Hood's account of money advanced to Coleridge in 1815 is among the Victoria College papers transcribed by Professor Whalley. It reads as follows:
- Cash advanced S. T. Coleridge to be paid by sale of his book
- 1815
- April paid his annuity to J ?P. Hinckley & Co in London 27.5.6
- His draft & Cash in Bristol 45.0.0
- --------
- 72.5.6
- Oct Cash note to Calne to enable him to send his son Hartley to Oxford 10.0.0
- Dec 9 paid his draft at 2 months dated Calne to relieve him from anxiety regarding some debts & to enable him thus to compleat his Work 25.0.0
- -----
- £107.5.6
Mr Hood's Account
Coleridge hoped that he could write new poems to make up a second volume. As he was unable to do so, Sibylline Leaves appeared in one only volume.
I wish to express my gratitude to Professor H. Peter Kahn, of the Department of Art History at Cornell University, with whom I examined Professor Abrams's copy of the first edition of the Biographia. I wanted to know if there was evidence beyond the Gutch account and the signature change cited by Griggs which identifies the parts of the book printed in Bristol and London (see CL, IV, 658-59). Professor Kahn pointed out that the font of type used in Bristol is thinner and less vertical than the London font. In addition, the Bristol printer, John Evans, to whom Gutch farmed the work out, used too much oil in his ink and persistently overinked his press. Afterwards, I looked at copies of the 1817 Biographia in the collections at Cornell, Yale, and the New York Public Library. These all confirm that the Bristol printing stopped at the end of signature II, page 144 of Volume II. In all of the copies, furthermore, watermarks first appear early in signature HH, go on into signature II, and continue through the signatures printed in London. The watermark in signatures HH and II has the letters "C & C" above the date "1815." The watermarks from signature KK onwards (the first London signature) show only dates, the numerals of which are larger than the "1815" in signatures HH and II. From signature LL onwards, the watermark date "1815" is replaced by "1816."
Whalley's argument on this point appears in the notes he made with his transcripts of the Biographia correspondence at Victoria College. (See my note following the list of documents in Section II above).
But surely there is no warrant, in any case, for Watson's version of the sentence. Even in the 1965 revision of his edition, when he inserted the proper commas in his quotation of the first sentence of the letter of 29 July 1815, he regularized the capitalization of what he took to be a title and he placed it in italics: "The necessity of extending, what I first intended as a preface, to an Autobiographia Literaria, or Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions, as far as . . ." This, on Mr. Watson's part, is wishful typography.
Coleridge may, in fact, have dictated these letters in whole or in part. The letters do not seem to me, however, to be in Coleridge's style. Other letters by Morgan, for instance 6 May 1816 to Gutch, contain phrasing which is unmistakably Coleridge's.
I would guess that Morgan uses the count of "sides" in order to exaggerate the work completed, the count of "sheets" (half the number of sides) in order to diminish the apparent amount of work still to be done.
As indicated in the tabular synopsis of the compositional history of the Biographia, the change in Coleridge's thinking may have occurred between 10 and 20 August. Here is Mary Lamb's phrasing as she quotes Mrs. Morgan's description of Coleridge's work in her letter of 20 August 1815 (O): "The title of it is 'Autobiographia Literaria' to which are added 'Sibylline Leaves,' a collection of Poems by the same author." This sentence is so similar to Coleridge's titling of the work in his letter of 17 September that it is evident Coleridge must at least have discussed before 20 August 1815 such a change in the comparative importance of the Biographia and Sibylline Leaves.
"The Type and Size of the Preface in the first Volume of Wordsworth's recent collection of his poems pleased my friends here," Coleridge wrote to Gutch on 17 September 1815, "but I think it rather too open and naked for a Book."
Coburn has identified Notebook entries of 1811 which Coleridge clearly had open before him in writing Chapter XIV of the Biographia (E). Perhaps Coleridge planned, as he began the "Preface" to Sibylline Leaves, to rely heavily on such borrowings from his own notes. As it turned out, he apparently did not take very much of the Biographia directly from the Notebooks (see, however, notes 8 above and 21 below). Nevertheless, if he at first thought he might do so, then that notion, especially in view of the brevity of the essay he initially planned, might go a long way toward explaining his confident expectation, on 30 May 1815, of finishing in two or three days.
In Notebook entry 4265, Professor Coburn has identified the most striking of the three entries which Coleridge almost certainly had before him in composing the Biographia. A series of philosophical propositions, the entry parallels the Theses in Chapter XII. "Coleridge," Coburn says, "probably had this notebook in his hands while dictating to Morgan (and, as argued below, a copy of Schelling's Abhandlungen as well)" (CN, III, 4265n.).
Professor Coburn, to be sure, refers (in CN, III, 4262n.) to "matter added in Sept-October 1816." Coleridge promised to add matter then, but his letters to Curtis of April and May 1817 suggest he did not in fact do so until later on. Coburn in the main seems to follow Griggs's suggestions about the history of the Biographia, so much so that a close connection between a notebook entry of uncertain date and the subject-matter of Chapter IX is evidence for her assigning the entry the probable date August-September 1815 (CN, III, 4258n.). Interestingly, in a short review of Griggs's 1959 volumes (Modern Philology 57 [1960], 264-268), she found fault with "the long editorial description of the Biographia Literaria and The Friend (which cannot be fully treated from the letters in any case but require various other documents which must be fully dealt with eventually by editors of these works)."
Professor Griggs provides a detailed account of the business dealings involved in production of the Biographia in CL, III, xlvii-li and in IV, 657-660n.
The quotation is from Professor Coburn's short review of CL, Modern Language Review, 55 (1960), 596-597.
Quoted from Arthur Quiller-Couch's introduction to Biographia Literaria: Chapters I-IV, XIV-XXII, ed. George Samson (1920), p. xxxiii.
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