University of Virginia Library

A Compositional History of the Biographia Literaria
by
Daniel Mark Fogel

I. Introduction

We now know that Coleridge wrote most of the Biographia Literaria during the summer of 1815. We are faced, however, with two major, conflicting reconstructions of Coleridge's work from June through September of 1815. The first, developed by J. Shawcross in 1907 and based on the pioneering researches of J. Dykes Campbell, was modified but not fundamentally altered by George Watson in the introduction to his 1956 edition of the Biographia. The Shawcross-Watson reconstruction is that Coleridge had written, by July of 1815, a literary autobiography comprising most of the first half of the Biographia Literaria. Then, Shawcross and Watson conjecture, Coleridge sat down to write a preface to the autobiography. The preface, consisting of the critique of Wordsworth (the chief matter of the second half of the Biographia), grew so long that it had to be appended to the already existing work.[1] The most recent account of the

birth of the Biographia was set forth in 1959 by E. L. Griggs in his introduction and notes to Volumes III and IV of the Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Griggs not only clashes with Shawcross and Watson in his description of the project which yielded the Biographia but also reverses the order they have assigned to the composition of the book's major elements. "At no time," says Griggs, "did Coleridge plan a preface to his autobiography."[2] Rather, the Biographia was an extension, in the summer of 1815, of the preface to a projected volume of poems, Sibylline Leaves. By July, Griggs argues, Coleridge had written the critique of Wordsworth. Then, in August and September, he added the "philosophical Part" (the chief matter of the first half of the Biographia).[3]

Griggs's version of the genesis of the Biographia, though based, as we shall see, on better evidence than had been available to Shawcross and Watson, has not put an end to the dispute. Watson allows only that Griggs "has restored to obscurity Coleridge's account of the composition of the Biographia" (BL-Watson, p. xxi). The controversy is a signal instance of how evidence, though abundant, may not suffice for certainty. Nevertheless, the evidentiary materials, including correspondence about the Biographia by Morgan, Hood, Gutch, and Gale & Fenner at Victoria College, Toronto, Griggs's 1959 volumes of Coleridge's Collected Letters, and Kathleen Coburn's recently published volume of his Notebooks, now make it possible to establish to a high degree of probability the important events in the making of Coleridge's great critical work. The tabular synopsis, below, of the probable evolution of the Biographia, and the "Analytic Narrative" following, aim to identify explicitly the chapters belonging to each stage of the composition of that book. This newly detailed and revised history of the text has important implications for the interpretation of the Biographia and for the solution of some problems raised by the volume— for example, the reasons for the seeming discrepancy in Coleridge's treatment of the imagination in Chapters XIII and XIV, and the practical necessities, given the deadlines, for his wholesale importations from Schelling and others. So far as previous scholarship on the question is concerned, the present essay confirms, for the most part, the validity of Griggs's compact arguments about the evolution of the Biographia from a preface to a book of poems, analogous to Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads of 1800, to an independent "Work per se" (CL, IV, 585).

II. A Tabular Synopsis: Probable Evolution of the Biographia Literaria

Note: Abbreviations in parentheses refer to documentary evidence identified in the list following the table.

                         

Month	Year	Probable Events in the Making of the Biographia
October	1800	Coleridge (STC) expresses interest in writing "An Essay on the Elements of Poetry." (A)
July	1802	STC feels a growing need to define a suspected "radical difference" between himself and Wordsworth. (B,C)
September	1803	STC conceives of writing "my metaphysical works as my life & in my life." (D)
October & November	1811	STC writes lecture notes on which he will draw in detail, in 1815, for Chapter XIV of the Biographia. (E)
March	1815	In desperate financial straits, STC plans a collection of his poems. It will include "a general Preface . . . on the Principles of philosophic and genial criticism relatively to the Fine Arts; but especially to Poetry," and should be "ready for the press by June." (F,G,H)
April & May	1815	STC collects his poems. He receives a copy of the 1815 edition of Wordsworth's poems (CL, III, xlviii). At the end of May he tells Wordsworth that he has "only to finish a preface which I shall have done in two or at farthest three days." (I,J)
June & July	1815	STC extends the preface to his poems, making it "an Autobiographia literaria, or Sketches of my literary Life & opinions, as far as Poetry and poetical Criticism is concerned." So extended, the preface consists, by 29 July, of Chapters I through V and XIV through XXII of the Biographia. (K,L,O)
August & September	1815	Deluding himself that he will finish rapidly, STC expands ten to twelve manuscript pages of metaphysics throughout most of these two months. On 10 August, Morgan sends Chapters I-III to Bristol, where the work will be printed. STC revises Chapters IV and V and writes Chapters VI through XIII.
		Perhaps between 10 August and 20 August, certainly by 17 September, STC's conception of his work changes. It is no longer subordinate to the book of poems to which it was to be the preface. It is now the more important work and a book in its own right. He decides to divide it into chapters.
		STC writes into the third week in September. On 19 September (CL, III, xlix) he sends "compleat to my printer" the manuscript of the Biographia. (L,M,N,O,Q, R,S,T,U)
October	1815	Printing of the Biographia begins (CL, III, xlix).
April & May	1816	Gutch tells Morgan he has discovered that the two volumes, one the Biographia Literaria, the other Sibylline Leaves, will be of unequal size. Morgan consults with John Murray and STC, then advises Gutch to split the Biographia into two volumes, making the three volumes proportionate. (V)

               

Month	Year	Probable Events in the Making of the Biographia
July	1816	STC contracts with Gale & Fenner to publish the Biographia, Sibylline Leaves, and all his future works.
		Gutch informs STC that there is not enough manuscript to make Volume II of the Biographia equal in size to Volume I and Sibylline Leaves. (W,X)
August through December	1816	Relations between Gutch and STC disintegrate. In the fall, Gutch stops the printing of the Biographia at the end of page 144 of Volume II. STC plans to assemble additional materials required by "the printer's blunder." (Y,Z,AA,BB)
January through June	1817	Gale & Fenner negotiate with Gutch to obtain the manuscript and the printed sheets of the Biographia. The materials do not arrive in London until April, and the publishers do not finally settle with Gutch until May. (CC, DD, FF, GG, II, JJ, KK, LL)
		Early in the year, STC considers supplying Zapolya to fill out Volume II of the Biographia. Since the rights to publication of Zapolya have been promised to John Murray, however, STC decides to insert "Satyrane's Letters" and the critique of Bertram instead. STC writes the "Conclusion" of the Biographia and possibly pads the last two-thirds of Chapter XXII. (EE, HH, II, MM, NN)
		Samuel Curtis completes the printing of the Biographia.
July	1817	The Biographia Literaria and Sibylline Leaves are published.[4] (OO)

List of Documentary Evidence for Reconstruction of the Composition of the Biographia Literaria

• A) STC, letter to Humphry Davy, 9 October 1800;
• B) STC, letter to William Sotheby, 13 July 1802;
• C) STC, letter to Robert Southey, 29 July 1802;
• D) STC, notebook entry of September, 1803, #1515;
• E) STC, notebook entries of 1811-1812, #4111 and #4112;
• F) STC, letter to Joseph Cottle, 7 March 1815;
• G) STC, letter to Cottle, 10 March 1815;
• H) STC, letter to Byron, 30 March 1815;
• I) STC, letter to Lady Beaumont, 3 April 1815;
• J) STC, letter to William Wordsworth, 30 May 1815;
• K) STC, letter to Dr. Brabant, 29 July 1815;
• L) John Morgan, letter to Thomas Hood, 10 August 1815;
• M) Morgan, letter to Hood, 14 August 1815;
• N) Morgan, letter to Hood, 17 August 1815;
• O) Mary Lamb, letter to Sarah Hutchinson, 20 August 1815;
• P) STC, notebook entry of August-September 1815, #4265;
• Q) STC, letter to John Gutch, 17 September 1815;
• R) STC, letter to John May, 27 September 1815;
• S) STC, letter to Daniel Stuart, 7 October 1815;
• T) STC, letter to Byron, 15 October 1815;

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223




• U) STC, letter to Washington Allston, 25 October 1815;
• V) Morgan, letter to Gutch, 6 May 1816;
• W) STC, letter to John Gale, 8 July 1816;
• X) STC, letter to Morgan, 17 July 1816;
• Y) STC, letter to Gutch, 6 August 1816;
• Z) STC, letter to Rest Fenner, 22 September 1816;
• AA) Hood, letter to STC, 23 October 1816;
• BB) Gutch, letter with accounts to STC, 18 December 1816;
• CC) Gale & Fenner, letter to Gutch, 14 January 1817;
• DD) Gutch, letter to Gale & Fenner, January, 1817;
• EE) STC, letter to John Murray, 27 February 1817;
• FF) Gale & Fenner, letter to Gutch, 5 March 1817;
• GG) Gutch, letter to Gale & Fenner, March, 1817;
• HH) STC, letter to Thomas Curtis, 14 March 1817;
• II) STC, letter to Curtis, 29 April 1817;
• JJ) Gale & Fenner, letter to Gutch, 13 May 1817;
• KK) Gutch, letter to Gale & Fenner, 14 May 1817;
• LL) Gale & Fenner, letter to Gutch with accounts, 16 May 1817;
• MM) STC, letter to Curtis, May 1817;
• NN) STC, letter to Curtis, 22 May 1817;
• OO) STC, letter to Thomas Poole, 22 July 1817.

All of the letters by Coleridge appear in Professor Griggs's Collected Letters. Mary Lamb's letter is in The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas (1935), II, 171-176. The entries from Coleridge's notebooks are in The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, I (1957) and III (1973). Following parenthetic citations of CN are to this edition. For the letters of Morgan, Gutch, Hood, and Gale & Fenner, I first used George Whalley's transcripts of Biographia correspondence at Victoria College, Toronto, and later travelled to Toronto to examine the original manuscripts. Professor Whalley's transcripts were lent to me by M. H. Abrams. I am grateful to Professors Whalley and Abrams for the opportunity to examine these materials. I also wish to thank Professor Whalley for his permission to refer to an argument he advanced in typescript notes about the birth of the Biographia in the mid-fifties (see text below and n. 14). Subsequent parenthetic citations of capital letters are to the alphabetical listing above.

III. An Analytic Narrative of the Making of the Biographia Literaria

The account of the Biographia's pre-composition, supplied in its essentials by Shawcross, was given its most elegant and thought-provoking examination by George Whalley in 1953 and is summarized most clearly by George Watson in the introduction to his edition of the text (BL-Watson, pp. ix-xii).[5] The first piece of evidence is a letter of 9 October 1800 to Humphry Davy (A) in which Coleridge says that he is even more interested in writing "An Essay on the Elements of Poetry" than in a long-contemplated work on Lessing. In 1802, Coleridge wrote two letters (B and C) which contain, according to M. H. Abrams, "the most revealing clues to Coleridge's standpoint and intention in his debate with Wordsworth."[6]

Writing to Sotheby and Southey in July of 1802, Coleridge stresses in his plans for a work "Concerning Poetry" the discovery of "a radical difference" between himself and Wordsworth. This early plan, intended to make clear Coleridge's growing discomfort with Wordsworth's Preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads (an essay Coleridge calls "half a child of my own Brain"), leads Watson to suggest that the conception of the Preface in the Vale of Grasmere in 1800 is "the first recorded moment in the life" of the Biographia (BL-Watson, p. ix). In addition, Whalley cites a notebook entry of 1803 (D): "Seem to have made up my mind to write my metaphysical works as my life & in my life—intermixed with all the other events or history of the mind & fortunes of S. T. Coleridge."[7] Thus, in the opening years of the century, Coleridge possessed the main elements of the Biographia, both in its intense concern with speculation arising from his experience of Wordsworth and in its autobiographical intention.

Yet between August of 1803 (the date of the notebook entry) and March of 1815, when the story of the Biographia resumes, there is no evidence that Coleridge so much as contemplated a literary autobiography.[8] These were the poet's blackest years, blighted by opium addiction and its attendant woes: financial insecurity, physical deterioration, the paralyzing torment of guilt about his apparent self-destruction, and the erosion of his

personal relations. His friendship with Wordsworth was severely tried, and their rupture of 1810 was still fresh in Coleridge's mind when he settled with the family of John Morgan in early 1815. His desire to protect himself from Wordsworth by self-distinction, by drawing a clear line between himself and a man whom he considered the greater poet, must have been sharpened by his reflections on The Excursion, which had been out for just half a year. We should picture Coleridge as he has passed the threshold of middle age, at the end of a decade in which he had consulted no fewer than seven doctors in his struggle to understand and master opium addiction, viewing the productivity of his old comrade against the backdrop of his own inanition, and tormented not least of all because The Excursion had disappointed his high expectations. If we also consider Coleridge's extreme financial anxieties, on his family's as well as on his own behalf, we will gain a further, important insight into his probable state of mind in the early spring of 1815.

Suddenly, in March of 1815, three letters indicate that Coleridge has determined to undertake a large project. A letter to Joseph Cottle early in the month (F) is the first signal of the long, remarkable burst of production comprising, among other works, the Biographia, Sibylline Leaves, the revised three-volume Friend, and The Statesman's Manual. The work in hand, which Coleridge offers Cottle as security for an advance of funds, is a volume of "my scattered & my Manuscript Poems." Certain of refusal, he informs Cottle three days later (G) that he has asked Thomas Hood to solicit an advance from a group of friends in Bristol, Mss Poems equal to one volume of 250 to 300 pages being sent to them immediately." Hood complied, and the labor which would culminate in both Sibylline Leaves and the Biographia began.[9] Evidently Coleridge thought the volume of poems could be completed rapidly. At the end of March, he writes Lord Byron (H) and petitions for his good offices in finding a publisher for the collection, now envisaged as two volumes.[10] "A general Preface," he tells Byron, "will be pre-fixed, on the Principles of philosophic and genial

criticism relatively to the Fine Arts in general; but especially to Poetry." Both volumes would "be ready for the press by the first week in June."[11]

The next two months, April and May, were spent in gathering Coleridge's poems, editing them, and trying (unsuccessfully, despite his attempts to talk a good game) to add new verse to the collection. He is thus engaged when he writes to Lady Beaumont early in April (I), requesting that she send him her manuscript copy of his poem "To William Wordsworth." He explains that he is collecting poems to "be put to press by the middle of June." In May, after receiving a copy of Wordsworth's 1815 edition of his poems, Coleridge had to deal with Wordsworth's written request for an explanation of criticism of The Excursion passed on to him by Lady Beaumont from Coleridge's April letter to her (see CL, IV, 570-571). On 30 May, when Coleridge replies to Wordsworth (J), he is back on the schedule he had announced to Byron, for he has, he tells Wordsworth, "only to finish a Preface which I shall have done in two or at farthest three days." The poems, he must have thought then, were finally ready, and the "general Preface," which he had left till last, was such that it would be short work indeed.

At this point we encounter the most tangled problem in the history of the text. For all of June and July—the first two of the four critical months in the composition of the Biographia—we have but one piece of evidence, Coleridge's letter of 29 July to R. H. Brabant (K). To be sure, this letter contains the key to the major questions concerning the birth of the Biographia. But it is a key which opens too many doors, only one of which can be correct. The letter announces the completion of a work which has fully occupied Coleridge for some time, probably steadily throughout June and July. It is undoubtedly the work which became the Biographia, for Coleridge calls it "an Autobiographia literaria" and describes his having given "a full account . . . of Wordsworth's Poems & Theory" and "a disquisition on the powers of association, with the History of the Opinions on this subject from Aristotle to Hartley, and on the generic difference between the faculties of Fancy and Imagination." So much is beyond dispute. What is in contention is the evolution of the work as described in the first sentence of the letter.

The letter to Brabant has been in the public domain since 1870, when an inaccurate transcript of the manuscript was printed in the Westminster Review. Because this was the only available text of the letter until 1959, Shawcross in 1907 and Watson in 1956 arrived at nearly identical conclusions about what it says. Shawcross with extreme caution and Watson with the assurance that the evidence is "perfectly explicit" surmise that Coleridge had by July of 1815 completed an autobiography (BL-Watson, p. xiii). For, conjectures Shawcross, "the original preface was either conceived as a literary autobiography, or very soon took that form" (BL-Shawcross,

I, xc). By this account, Coleridge set out in July to write a preface to his literary life. This got out of hand, for he found himself writing the long critique of Wordsworth as well as at least part of the discussions of association and of fancy and imagination. Since what Coleridge had planned as a preface to "an Autobiographia literaria" had exceeded its limits, it "had to be incorporated," as Shawcross puts it, "into the whole work" (BL-Shawcross, I, xc-xci). Shawcross believes that the work sent to Gutch in 1815 did not include Chapter XXII, for he follows Dykes Campbell's error in concluding that the Bristol printing ended with page 128, Volume II. Chapter XXII, says Shawcross, was not written until the necessity of padding the Biographia's second volume arose in 1816. Watson holds that XXII was sent to Gutch in 1815. Since, however, the Bristol printing stopped at the end of page 144 of Volume II, about onethird of the way into Chapter XXII, and since printing did not resume at page 145 until the spring of 1817, Watson suggests that the final two-thirds of Chapter XXII may have been padded later (see BL-Watson, pp. xvixvii).[12] Otherwise, both Shawcross and Watson posit that the critique of Wordsworth, constituting Volume II of the Biographia (excepting only the interpolated matter of 1817 and the Conclusion) and a small portion of Volume I ("some part at least" of the philosophical material, says Shawcross) were the additions of midsummer 1815 to an already complete work comprising the greater part of Volume I. Basically they would have it that the book was built from bottom to top, Volume I preceding Volume II in composition.

Yet there are strong grounds for believing the opposite to have been the case. Here is the first sentence of the letter to Brabant as read by Shawcross and by Watson when he wrote his preface in 1956: "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 poetry and poetical

criticism are concerned, has confined me to my study from eleven to four and from six to ten, since I last left you."[13] Here is the same sentence, printed in accurate transcript for the first time by Griggs in 1959: "The necessity of extending, what I first intended as a preface, to an Autobiographia literaria, or Sketches of my literary Life & opinions, as far as poetry and poetical Criticism is [are] concerned, has confined me to my Study from 11 to 4, and from 6 to 10, since I last left you" (CL, IV, 578). All of the differences from the earlier printed text of the letter are important, but the most telling difference is the insertion of commas setting off the words "what I first intended as a preface." Where Shawcross and Watson had read a compound noun, seeing Coleridge as having enlarged a prefaceto-an-Autobiographia, Griggs's text suggests, as he says, that "at no time did Coleridge propose a preface to his autobiography. In his letter of 29 July he refers to a preface to his poems" (CL, IV, 578n.). For the comma severing "preface" from what Griggs reads as the indirect object of "extending" (so that he understands Coleridge to have extended the preface to the poems into "an Autobiographia literaria") makes the preface-to-an-Autobiographia reading less appealing. One notes too that Griggs's transcript offers nothing with any typographical resemblance to a book title. Coleridge's capitalization is old-fashioned (e.g. "Criticism" and "Study" in the first sentence of the letter to Brabant) and he does not always italicize the titles of books, yet it is rare to find titles in which he has both omitted italics and left the initial letters of key words in lower case. "Autobiographia literaria" is probably not a title to the work but merely a description of its nature: it is probably, though extended, a preface to the poems and not what Coleridge later called "a Work per se," which would have merited, if not italics, at least a capital "L" in "literaria." One might note that even before the Griggs transcription appeared, George Whalley took issue with Watson. Professor Whalley had always read the disputed sentence just as Griggs reads it.[14] Yet, in justice to Watson's reconstruction, it must be admitted that the letter by itself cannot "be interpreted with certainty" (BL-Watson, p. xxi). That is, Watson may still be right.[15] But tracking the story of the Biographia one step further, we find evidence which swings the balance of probability to Griggs's view.

Throughout August, Coleridge worked strenuously. He had two projects on his hands, the final preparation of material for Sibylline Leaves and of that for its extended preface, "an Autobiographia literaria." He was sufficiently preoccupied to leave all of his correspondence to John Morgan. Three letters of August, 1815, from Morgan to Thomas Hood provide evidence for reconstruction of the events of this period.[16] The most important of the three, dated 10 August 1815 (L), accompanied the first dispatch of material to the printer in Bristol, John Gutch. The work at issue is clearly intended for Sibylline Leaves, for Morgan explains that the delay in sending the remainder of the manuscript has been caused by an allegedly minor difficulty in the "prefacing work," an essay already of such length as to astonish Morgan ("you will see how rediculous it wod be to call it preface"). We may surmise that the "57 sides" sent to Bristol by Morgan in early August included some poems and, as Coleridge's letter to Gutch of 17 September indicates (Q), the first three chapters of the Biographia. "The rest," wrote Morgan, "(full 100 sides) is finished, and not finished— . . . there is a metaphysical part of about 5 or 6 sheets which must be revised or rather re-written." By "5 or 6 sheets" Morgan might have meant ten or twelve sides of manuscript or "5 or 6 sheets" of octavo forms, comprising eighty or ninety-six pages. The first alternative seems the more probable, first because Morgan, a layman, is unlikely to have used "sheets" in its technical printer's sense, second because Morgan, by his own account "no dreamer" ("my facts are not ideas you know"), is unlikely to have trusted the unpredictable Coleridge to rewrite close to a hundred printed pages in only "a few days."[17] The notes in this letter and also in that of 14 August (M) about duplicating the design of Wordsworth's latest Preface are a further indication that Coleridge still intended his "Autobiographia literaria" as a "prefacing work" to Sibylline Leaves in the style of the famous Preface to which he saw himself as responding. Here, as throughout our story, we find reaction to Wordsworth a major shaping force on the Biographia. On 17 August, the date of the third August letter (N), Morgan still expects to post the remaining material for Sibylline Leaves in short order.

But mid-September would pass before the work was complete. On 17 September (Q), Coleridge announces to Gutch a radical change in the plan he had more or less held to since March. He freely admits that the August promises of additional material for the press were a consequence of his self-delusion "with the belief, that I should have finished & be

able to write myself [i.e., rather than Morgan in his stead] in the course of a few days." Presumably the work which remained to be done on August 10, the revision of "5 or 6 sheets," had led to a further, demanding expansion of the preface to the poems, so much so that it is now, in mid-September, "not a Preface, nor any thing in the Nature of a Preface, but a Work per se: I would fain have it printed in chapters." It has become, moreover, "the main work," for Coleridge has resolved not to print "Poems and a Preface" but instead to issue "Biographical Sketches of my LITER-ARY LIFE, Principles and Opinions, chiefly on the subjects of Poetry and Philosophy, and the Differences at present prevailing concerning them both: by S. T. Coleridge. To which are added, Sibylline Leaves, or a Collection of Poems, by the same Author."[18] The new stress on philosophy suggests that it was the enlargement of the "metaphysical part" of the Sibylline Leaves preface in August and the first half of September of 1815 which changed the piece into "a Work per se." And Coleridge's retraction of the August requests to emulate the design of Wordsworth's Preface encourages the conclusion that his notion of the "Autobiographia literaria" as an analogue to his friend's work had also changed in the intervening weeks.[19] Probably on 19 September, the entire manuscript was sent to Bristol. In letters of 29 September and 7 October (R and S) Coleridge says the work has passed wholly out of his hands and into the printer's. "I have delivered compleat to my printer . . . the Mss of two Volumes octavo," he tells John May. And on 15 October (T), he informs Byron that the two volumes "are now entire in the printer's possession." Although he was not yet done with the project conceived in March of 1815, he thought that he was. Only an unfortunate miscalculation extended his labor beyond the reading of the proofsheets, which began to come to him in October. Printing of the Biographia began in October, 1815, that of Sibylline Leaves a month later (CL, IV, xlix).

Before pursuing the narration, I should like to set down what seems to me, on the basis of the evidence underlying the foregoing account, the most probable reconstruction of the evolution of the Biographia in 1815. In March, Coleridge made a plan to issue his poems in two volumes, with a preface. But the preface, which at the end of May still promised to be

a short essay, confined him to his study throughout June and July, when he probably wrote the critique of Wordsworth (Chapters XIV-XXI and certainly the first thirteen pages of Chapter XXII) and at least the first three chapters of Volume I.[20] To the production of June and July we can probably add Chapter IV—which in addition to being a natural antecedent to Chapter XIV introduces the Fancy-Imagination distinction— and Chapter V. It is likely that Chapter V, headed "On the law of association—Its history traced from Aristotle to Hartley," was behind Coleridge's description to Brabant of the philosophical portion of his extension of the preface, "just finished" on 29 July. He must have realized, though, that Chapter V barely scratched the surface of his philosophical concerns, yet for a curiously long time he misled himself as well as Morgan in the belief that the "metaphysical part of 5 and 6 sheets" (probably not much more than the present Chapter V) could be revised in a few days. Accordingly, when Morgan urged him to give the printer manuscript from which he could begin setting type, Coleridge allowed only what became Chapters I-III out of his hands. That he would have held onto Chapter IV in contemplating expansion of Chapter V is understandable, since he did not yet see the "Autobiographia" as "a Work per se" and had therefore failed to divide it into chapters. He would have wanted to keep with him the material immediately preceding what became Chapter V in his anxiety not to send to press manuscript which might require important revision. As it turned out, rewriting the "metaphysical part" entailed so great an enlargement of the intended preface that Coleridge's conception of the work had changed irrevocably by 17 September. He must have written his opening comment about the "miscellaneous reflections" of the Biographia, therefore, before 10 August. But the more pointed "immethodical miscellany" remark occurs at the end of Chapter X and must have been written after Coleridge had transformed the scope of his text. What would have been first drafted in August and September, then, were Chapters VI through XIII, part of Chapter V certainly, and part of Chapter IV in all probability.[21] As we have seen, Coleridge was under fierce pressure from Gutch and Morgan to send the Biographia to press. Surely it was this pressure, as he sped to complete Chapters XII and XIII—the last of the Biographia he produced in 1815—that forced Coleridge to plunder Schelling's Abhandlungen as he did in Chapter XII. The anxiety about having fallen so far behind his deadline may also account, in part at least, for the odd, evasive letter to "C." in Chapter XIII. Since Chapter XII refers to the date "this morning (16 September 1815)" and since Coleridge sent the Biographia manuscript "compleat," as he then thought, "to my printer" on 19 September, we can be sure that Chapters XII and XIII were turned out at white heat. Gutch also must have thought the work complete, for, in a letter of December, 1816 (Z), he threatened to issue the book himself as it had first been sent to him.

Printing of the Biographia went on from the fall of 1815 through the early spring of 1816, when it was discovered that the two volumes (the Biographia and Sibylline Leaves) would be of unequal length. Coleridge later blamed Gutch for "the blunder" of deciding to issue the work in three volumes of equal size (Z). But Morgan's letter of 6 May 1816 indicates that the decision to divide the Biographia into two volumes was collective; Coleridge, who had accurately computed the length of both the poems and the Biographia (in G and U), was no less to blame than Gutch for not realizing that the Biographia manuscript of 1815 would fall considerably short of two volumes of 300 pages each (see also letters X and Y). Coleridge's disgust was extreme. He so exacerbated relations with Gutch that the printing in Bristol came to a halt in the fall of 1816, at the end of page 144 of Volume II. The manuscript, along with the sheets already printed, would have to be sent to Coleridge's London publisher, Gale & Fenner, with whom he had contracted in the summer of 1816 (W). Gale & Fenner could then see the book through to completion. But Gutch refused to send the materials he held until financial accounts were settled. This held up the entire project until the spring of 1817, when Gutch at last surrendered the manuscript and printed sheets. In September of 1816, Coleridge wrote of starting on the extra material needed to fill out Volume II of the Biographia (Z), but he did not complete this task until the spring of 1817 (II, MM).[22] At one point he apparently considered filling out the Biographia with Zapolya, but a prior commitment of the play to

John Murray forced him to use "Satyrane's Letters" and the critique of Bertram instead (EE, HH). He would then have had to revise at least the last page of Chapter XXII. Watson's speculation that he padded throughout the latter portion of XXII is at least possible on the basis of what we now know, as is his supposition about the Conclusion, which he says was made up in 1817 of parts of the old ending of Chapter XXII and of new material in response to attacks on Coleridge in the autumn 1816 numbers of the Edinburgh Review (BL-Watson, pp. xvii-xviii). By 22 July 1817 (KK), Sibylline Leaves and the Biographia Literaria had been published.[23]

Coleridge's composition of most of the Biographia in three and a half months in 1815 was an astounding feat of concentration and energy. Doubtless John Morgan, who took dictation from Coleridge, was indispensable to the effort. "Possibly," Kathleen Coburn observes, "the albatross fell off into the sea when John Morgan, acting as amanuensis, extracted the Biographia from Coleridge, almost by force, in 1815."[24] But the extraordinary effort of will and intellect was Coleridge's. It is time that we bury for good the account of the Biographia's composition as "a story of ludicrous dilatoriness."[25] And such recent statements as M. G. Cooke's that Coleridge "balked" at the end of Chapter XIII, "accidentally turning to Wordsworth and opinions on poetry" and away "from his proper subject of the nature and function of the imagination"[26] ought now, at best, to be taken figuratively; after all, it appears most likely that Coleridge turned from Wordsworth and opinions on poetry to the "subject of the nature and function of the imagination." As George Whalley suggested twenty years ago, the more one reads the Biographia, the more one sees the intimate relation of the "metaphysical part" to the practical criticism of Wordsworth. That Coleridge spent two months adding the metaphysical part to a work which he could have passed off as finished demonstrates that from his standpoint the philosophy of Volume I of the Biographia was an essential foundation for the assessment of Wordsworth's poems, theory, and poetry in Volume II.

In dealing with the story of the Biographia, we are forced to go beyond the ambiguities of the evidence into the realm of conjecture. Working with possibilities and probabilities, we cannot claim certainty for our conclusions, and so the role of the textual historian is reduced (or perhaps raised) to advocacy of supposition and conjecture. The future insertion of a single

new fact into the array of evidence may alter the matter only slightly or else may force us wholly to revise our estimates of the probabilities and give us new insight into the compositional history of the Biographia. The reconstruction offered here confirms Griggs in his reading of the letter to Dr. Brabant and in his dating of the composition of the greater portion of Volume I after that of Volume II but is considerably more explicit in identifying the particular chapters of the Biographia assignable to each stage of the development of the text. Coleridge's letter of 17 September in particular reinforces my sense of the sequence: it could only have been shortly before writing to Gutch on that date—and not, as Griggs suggests, "not long after writing to Wordsworth" in May (CL, III, xlvii)—that Coleridge grasped the nature of the changes his work had undergone from preface, to prefacing "Autobiographia literaria," to the Biographia Literaria, a separate title in its own right. It would be illuminating to know the fate of the proofsheets of the Biographia, particularly if, like the proofsheets of Sibylline Leaves, they contain "numerous revisions and corrections" by Coleridge (CL, IV, 618). We shall be able to distinguish the passages that were dictated to John Morgan from those penned by Coleridge only if someone turns up the missing manuscript of the Biographia. But unless and until new information does turn up, the foregoing reconstruction of the birth of the Biographia would seem the most probable and detailed possible. Coleridge's great critical work emerged from a thicket of tangled designs and intentions. Reviewing the evidence about the making of the text, one recalls William Hazlitt's report that Coleridge liked "to compose in walking over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling branches of a copsewood."[27] The present account of the composition of the Biographia, based on all the facts now known to me, not only illuminates major problems raised by the text but also constitutes a chapter in the astonishing story of Coleridge's breakthrough into the productive period of his middle years.

Notes