The Regions of Sara Coleridge’s Thought: Selected Literary Criticism

268 Pages·2012·1.594 MB·English

by  Peter Swaab (auth.)

Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters
Series Editor: Marilyn Gaull
This series presents original biographical, critical, and scholarly studies of literary
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Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter, by Peter J. Kitson
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Romantic Migrations , by Michael Wiley
The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles, by Matthew Schneider
British Periodicals and Romantic Identit y, by Mark Schoenfield
Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism, by Clare Broome Saunders
British Victorian Women’s Periodicals, by Kathryn Ledbetter
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Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature ,
edited by Monika Elbert and Marie Drews
Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print , by Alberto Gabriele
Romanticism and the Object , edited by Larry H. Peer
Poetics en passant, by Anne Jamison
From Song to Print, by Terence Hoagwood
Gothic Romanticism , by Tom Duggett
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Trauma, Transcendence, and Trust , by Thomas J. Brennan, S.J.
The Business of Literary Circles in Nineteenth-Century America , by David Dowling
Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain , by Clare A. Simmons
Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism , by Ashton Nichols
The Poetry of Mary Robinson , by Daniel Robinson
Romanticism and the City , by Larry H. Peer
Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination , by Gregory Leadbetter
Dante and Italy in British Romanticism , edited by Frederick Burwick and Paul
Douglass
Jewish Representation in British Literature 1780–1840 , by Michael Scrivener
Romantic Dharma , by Mark Lussier
Robert Southey , by Stuart Andrews
Playing to the Crowd , by Frederick Burwick
The Regions of Sara Coleridge’s Thought , by Peter Swaab
FORTHCOMING TITLES:
John Thelwall and the Wordsworth Circle , by Judith Thompson
Wordsworth and Coleridge , by Peter Larkin
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The Regions of Sara
Coleridge’s Thought
Selected Literary Criticism
Peter Swaab
THE REGIONS OF SARA COLERIDGE’S THOUGHT
Copyright © Peter Swaab, 2012.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-62367-5
All rights reserved.
First published in 2012 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-38501-0 ISBN 978-1-137-01160-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137011602
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First edition: January 2012
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments v ii
Introduction i x
List of Abbreviations xxxiii
Textual Note xxxv
1 Sara Coleridge on Sara Coleridge 1
2 Sara Coleridge on Samuel Taylor Coleridge and
on Editing Samuel Taylor Coleridge 29
3 Sara Coleridge in Editions of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 4 9
4 Sara Coleridge on William Wordsworth 83
5 Sara Coleridge Writing for the Q uarterly Review 1 01
6 Sara Coleridge on the Literature of Earlier Times 115
7 Sara Coleridge on Her Contemporaries 129
Notes 203
Further Reading 217
Index of Recipients 223
Index 225

Acknowledgments
The research for this book was supported by a Research Leave award
from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). It was
also supported by a Mellon Fellowship awarded by the Harry Ransom
Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. I
am very grateful to both institutions.
Manuscript holdings at the Jerwood Centre are quoted by kind
permission of the Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage, Cumbria. Those
in the HRC are quoted by kind permission of the Harry Ransom
Humanities Research Center. I should like to thank the staff of both
libraries, and in particular Richard Workman and Pat Fox at the
Ransom Center, and Jeff Cowton and Rebecca Turner at the Jerwood
Centre. For permission to quote Sara Coleridge’s marginal annota-
tion to “Poppies” in Dora Wordsworth’s copy of P retty Lessons in
Verse , I am grateful to Ruth Lightbourne of the Alexander Turnbull
Library, Wellington, New Zealand.
Marilyn Gaull, the general editor of the series in which this book
appears, has been an encouraging friend and crucial enabler of the
project from its beginnings.
I would like to thank colleagues at the 2008 and 2010 Coleridge
Summer Conferences for their questions, advice, and encouragement,
and Nicholas Roe, the conference director, in particular. I am also
grateful to many friends and academic colleagues for various kinds
of help: Rosemary Ashton, James Ball, Frederick Burwick, Martha
Campbell, Jonathan Crewe, Gregory Dart, Pat Fox, Tim Fulford,
Vanessa Guignery, Judith Hawley, Philip Horne, Kevin Jackson,
Danny Karlin, Alison Light, James Mays, Charlotte Mitchell, Howard
Moss, Jacqueline Munoz, Beth Newman, Ruth Perry, Christopher
Ricks, Ivy Schweitzer, Hannah Slapper, Heidi Thomson, Alan Vardy,
Katie Waldegrave, Joanne Wilkes, Barbara Will, and Melissa Zeiger.
Thanks above all to Andrew McDonald for indispensable support and
for many vital contributions to the book, including its cover design.
“No work is so inadequately rewarded either by money or credit
as that of editing miscellaneous, fragmentary, immethodical lit
viii Acknowledgments
remains like those of STC,” Sara Coleridge grumbled to her diary
in 1848. As these acknowledgments show, I’ve been luckier; but I
know what she means, and it seems best to end with a tribute to Sara
Coleridge herself, whose admirable mind and character have made
this project truly rewarding.
Introduction
Sara Coleridge was among the best literary critics of the early Victorian
years. Her prolific prose writings show exceptional reach of thought,
cultural breadth, accuracy, and depth of judgment; she had “great
natural endowments and really astonishing attainments,” 1 in the
words of her admiring antagonist Thomas De Quincey. Other voices
add powerful encomia. Hartley Coleridge, for instance, was familial
but not only familial, modest but not only modest when he judged
that of all Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s talented offspring “Sara is the
inheritrix of his mind and of his genius.” 2 Aubrey de Vere concurred,
in more romantic idiom: “Her father had looked down into her eyes,
and left in them the light of his own.” 3 Elizabeth Barrett thought she
“possesses more learning, in the strict sense, than any female writer
of the day.”4 Hartley praised her “Essay on Rationalism” (included
in Aids to Reflection ) as “a wonder. I say not a wonder of a woman’s
work – where lives the man that could have written it? None in Great
Britain since our Father died.”5 A century later Edmund Blunden
“doubted whether any finer philosopher (or reasoner) can be found
among Englishwomen.” 6 She deserves to be seen, without these gen-
der caveats, as one of the most powerful philosophical thinkers of
the early Victorian period. Even De Quincey, whom she sought to
confute in the 1847 B iographia , regarded “her mode of argument
as unassailable.” 7 In true Coleridgean style she brings a searching
conceptual intelligence to her literary criticism, always referring her
judgments to the criteria of value on which they depend.
Such attainments sound impressive, but not exactly lively. But Sara *
is also a trenchant, opinionated, and often funny writer, especially in
the private correspondence from which most of this edition is drawn.
Her social circle was wide and cultured, and she was an avid reader
of the publications of her day. Like Henry Crabb Robinson’s diaries,
* Many Coleridges feature in this story, and in the interests of brevity and dis-

ambiguation I generally refer to Sara Coleridge as “Sara” or “SC,” and her father as
“STC.”