Coleridge and the Romantic Newspaper: The 'Morning Post' and the Road to 'Dejection'

285 Pages·2016·2.219 MB·English

by  Heidi Thomson (auth.)

Coleridge and the Romantic Newspaper
The 'Morning Post' and the Road to 'Dejection'
-
Heidi Thomson
Coleridge and the Romantic Newspaper
Heidi   Thomson
Coleridge and the
Romantic Newspaper
The Morning Post and the Road to ‘Dejection’
Heidi   Thomson
Victoria University of Wellington
Wellington, New Zealand
ISBN 978-3-319-31977-3 ISBN 978-3-319-31978-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-31978-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016942692
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2 016
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Cover illustration: G enevieve (from a poem by S.T. Coleridge entitled ‘Love’), 1812,
by George Dawe. Gift of the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts, 1936. Te Papa
(1936-0012-81).
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For John and Dugal

A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Jack Stillinger introduced me to the Romantic poets at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and he taught me that the location of
a text matters. His teaching and textual scholarship were the original
inspiration for this book. Since then I have benefi ted from the gener-
ous advice, encouragement, and kindness of many scholars, family, col-
leagues, and friends. Most of the ideas in, or related to, this book were
fi rst tested during the panels, excursions, and walks of the Wordsworth
Summer Conferences and the Friends of Coleridge Conferences. For
that reason I am most grateful to the organizers, leaders of walks, and
the many delegates who have become friends over the years, including
Katy Beavers, Dometa Brothers, Frederick Burwick, Jamie Castell, Paul
and Jane Cheshire, Graham and Perdita Davidson, Richard and Fiona
Gravil, Anthony Harding, Felicity James, Peter Larkin, Stacey McDowell,
Michael O’Neill, Judith Page, Mark Sandy, Emily Stanback, Peter Swaab
and Andrew MacDonald, Nishi Pulugurtha, Linda Reesman, Anya Taylor,
Ann Wroe, and Saeko Yoshikawa. Particularly, without the encouragement
and advice of Nicholas Roe there would not have been a book—he helped
me map out the project, read work in progress, and provided valuable
feedback on the chapters.
I also thank friends, colleagues, and fellow Romanticists who have inspired
and propelled me with advice, reassurance, answers to queries, poetry, and
hospitable kindness: Deirdre Coleman, Judy Deuling, Stephen Gill, Nikki
Hessell, Jan Lauwereyns, Sarah Leggott, Lachie McLean, Vincent and
Helen O’Sullivan, Seamus Perry, Thomas Pfau, Jeffrey C. Robinson, Sarah
Ross, Esther Schor, Adam Sisman, Kathryn Walls, and Duncan Wu.
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For research and study leave, conference funding, and research assis-
tance, I gratefully acknowledge the support of the School of English,
Film, Theatre, and Media Studies, and the Faculty of the Humanities
and Social Sciences at Victoria University of Wellington. Thanks also to
Kōichi Inoue of the Victoria University of Wellington Library, the staff of
the British Library, and Moira Goff, the Librarian of the Garrick Club,
London. I owe much to the astute reading skills and the enthusiasm of my
postgraduate students: Rosalind Atkinson, Patrick Biggs, Cara Chimirri,
Keith Conway, Alexandra Paterson, Rose Sneyd, Saskia Voorendt, and
Greg Taylor, who also helped me as a research assistant in the fi nal stages
of the book. Special thanks to Ben Doyle and Tom René at Palgrave for
being so supportive and accommodating during a diffi cult year.
My mother, Juliana Dinnewet-Van de Veire, did not live to see the
fi nished book, but I take comfort in the fact that my father, Jozef Van de
Veire, was staying with us in New Zealand during the fi nal writing stages.
The book is dedicated to John and Dugal Thomson. John has read and
annotated everything I wrote at least twice and often more. His love,
humour, wisdom, and patience have been invaluable. Dugal has been liv-
ing with Coleridge for as long as he can remember. About fi ve years ago
he told me that Coleridge ‘would stay too long if he visited and he prob-
ably wouldn’t close the fridge door’. Coleridge stayed for a very long time
indeed, and now it is time to send him on his way.
Part of Chapter 1 originally appeared in a different form in S cript &
Print: Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia & New Zealand
29 (2005) under the title of ‘The Publication of Coleridge’s “Dejection:
An Ode” in the M orning Post ’. Versions of parts of Chapters 5 and 8 were
published in the C oleridge Bulletin 32 (2008) under the title ‘“Merely the
Emptying out of my Desk”: Coleridge about Wordsworth in the M orning
Post of 1802’. Part of Chapter 4 was fi rst published in N otes and Queries
61 (2014), 58–61, under the title ‘Coleridge’s “On a Supposed Son” and
Friedrich von Logau’s “Auf ein Zweifelkind”’, and is here reprinted with
permission of Oxford University Press. The cover illustration is a painting
held in Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, New Zealand: ‘G enevieve (from a
poem by S. T. Coleridge entitled ‘Love’), 1812, by George Dawe. Gift of
the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts, 1936. Te Papa (1936-0012-81)’.
March 2016
Wellington, New Zealand
C
ONTENTS
1 Introduction: A Character in the Antithetical Manner 1
2 The Return from Germany 2 1
3 The Morning Post and ‘Introduction to the
Tale of the Dark Ladie’ 4 7
4 Mothers, Sons, and Poets in the M orning Post 7 9
5 Homeless at Grieta Hall 103
6 The 1800 L yrical Ballads, Mary Robinson, and
‘The Mad Monk’ 135
7 Mary Robinson and the Poet Coleridge 1 63
8 ‘Merely the Emptying Out of My Desk’ 1 91
ix