Abstract
Setting a pattern for the next six years of his and Coleridge’s life, John Morgan came to the Hudson Hotel to reclaim Coleridge the moment he heard about his breakdown, packing up Coleridge’s belongings and moving him into the household Morgan shared with his wife Mary and her sister Charlotte Brent at Hammersmith on the outskirts of London. There Coleridge would continue until a sudden access of scrupulosity or a painful scene of one kind or another, usually involving his drinking or drug taking, drove him out on his own for a period or (less often) into the house of another friend. And when that happened, Coleridge would write letters blending acute self-analysis with maudlin apologies and after a while Morgan would come to reclaim him again, a situation that would be reversed momentarily in 1813 when, by exerting himself in borrowing and lecturing, Coleridge would recall Morgan from his bankrupt retreat in Ireland.1
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Notes
The Tragedy of King Lear, IV, i, 28 in the Folio version, in King Lear: The 1608 Quarto and 1623 Folio Texts, ed. Stephen Orgel (London: Penguin, 2000).
As quoted in Penny Gay, Jane Austen and the Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 13.
‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men were created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness’, ‘The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America, 4 July 1776’, reprinted in Revolutions 1775–1830, ed. Merryn Williams (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), pp. 44–53 (p. 45).
Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background 1760–1830 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 146.
A. S. [John Thelwall], The Champion, 21 December 1818, as quoted in Lectures on Literature (CC), I, 276.
Norman Fruman, Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1972), p. 101;
George Watson, in the introduction to his edition of Biographia Literaria, third edition (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1975), p. xix.
Jerome Christensen, ‘The Literary Life of a Man of Letters’, in his Coleridge’s Blessed Machine of Language (Ithaca, NY: Cornel University Press, 1981), pp. 118–85 (p. 121).
To quote John E. Jordan, Why the ‘Lyrical Ballads’? The Background, Writing, and Character of Wordsworth’s 1798 Lyrical Ballads (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1976), p. 158.
Review of Poems in Two Volumes, Edinburgh Review XI (October 1807), p. 218. Twentieth-century commentators have followed Jeffrey in remarking that, in the words of T. S. Eliot, Wordsworth’s ‘own language was as capable of artificiality, and no more capable of naturalness, than that of Pope — as Byron felt, and as Coleridge candidly pointed out’, in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, second edition (London: Faber & Faber, 1964), p. 26.
William Hazlitt, ‘Mr. Wordsworth’, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, in 21 vols (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1930–4), XI, 86–95.
Proper ‘poetical diction’, according to Johnson, was composed entirely of words ‘at once refined from the grossness of domestick use and free from the harshness of terms appropriated to particular arts’, in Samuel Johnson, ‘Life of Dryden’, Lives of the English Poets, World’s Classics, in 2 vols (London, New York, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1952), I, 420.
From the Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads (1798), in Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads, eds R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones, second edition (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 7.
See, for example, Diary Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, Barrister-at-Law, F.S.A., ed. Thomas Sadler, in 3 vols (London, 1869), I, 304–5.
Alvin Kernan, Printing Technology, Letters and Samuel Johnson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 6.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France: A Critical Edition, ed. J. C. D. Clark (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 238.
William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 164.
Two influential critical studies challenging a Wordsworth-centred Romantic literary culture were Marilyn Butler’s Romantics, Rebels & Reactionaries in 1981
and Jerome J. McGann’s The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983).
Byron’s Letters and Journals, Vol. 4, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1975), pp. 318–19, 324.
In his Life of John Sterling (1851), as quoted in Lives of the Great Romantics II: Keats, Coleridge and Scott by Their Contemporaries, Vol. 2, Coleridge, ed. Ralph Pite (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1997), p. 279.
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© 2007 William Christie
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Christie, W. (2007). ‘To Preserve the Soul Steady’: The Sage of Highgate. In: Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230627857_9
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