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The Kubla Khan Manuscript and Its First Collector

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The Kubla Khan Manuscript and Its First Collector THE KUBLA KHAN MANUSCRIPT AND ITS FIRST COLLECTOR HILTON KELLIHER COLERIDGE'S Kubla Khan, Or, A Vision in a Dream, first printed with Christabel The Pains of-Sleep in 1816, has long been regarded as one of the great literary icons of the Romantic movement. Coleridge's famous account of its conception in the summer or autumn of 1797 - the lonely Exmoor farmhouse, the effects of an 'anodyne', and the poetical reverie interrupted by the arrival of 'a person on business from Porlock'- contributed in no small measure to the hypnotic sway that it has always exercised over the imagination of its readers. Awe and wonderment were, if anything, only increased by the researches of J. L. Lowes and others into its sources, which proved to have stretched far beyond the simple sentence in Purchas his Pilgrimage that was allegedly the immediate inspiration.^ Yet these fifty-four verses were, the author later insisted, merely 'A Fragment'' rescued from a broken trance in which images, rising up before him 'as things', had shaped themselves into a poem of two or three hundred lines. Some scholars have been sceptical, seeing in Coleridge's insistence on the dream-origins of the poem a mere fiction masking his inability to complete it, though this line of argument is nowadays little regarded. Rather surprisingly for an author who left such a mass of papers behind him, the only manuscript text of the poem that is known to survive is the autograph fair copy publicly displayed for many years now in the British Library galleries.^ This first came to the notice of scholars in 1934, and was acquired for the nation in 1962 from the widow of the Marquess of Crewe who had inherited it from his father, the bibliophile Richard Monckton Milnes (1809-85), first Baron Houghton.^ Milnes had bought it at auction at Puttick and Simpson's premises in Leicester Square on 28 April 1859, where it was lot 109 (fig. i) in the Catalogue of a Very Select and Interesting Collection of Autograph Letters. It shows a strange sense of values that while the autograph of this, the most famous opium poem, fetched £1 15s Milnes had to pay £2 is for a two-page letter of 1812 (lot 483) in which Southey lamented that Coleridge's drug habit was 'incurable'! Market values at the time are put into further perspective by the fact that the Duchess of Marlborough's allegedly autograph character of Queen Anne (lot 359) cost Milnes ^£6, and a letter of Dryden (lot 209) £7 los.'' Of course, other things being equal, older items have generally tended to realize higher prices; but we can only speculate what the unique manuscript of Coleridge's most magical poem might fetch nowadays. 184 IJAT'S SALE. 17 CoLEHiDGE (Samuel Taylor). Autograph poetry, signed, 2 pages 4to. "This fragment with a good deal more not recoverable, composed, in a sort of reverie hrought on by two gruns of opium, taken to check 5 dysentery, 1797;" it commences:— '* In Xannadik did Cubla Khan A stately Pleasure Dome decree Where Alpht the sacred river ran ^ Hiro* Caves measureless to man, Down to a sanless sea.** 110 CoKQMVE (William) dramatic poet b. 1670, d. 1729 A.L.S., 1 page ^to., to J. Keally, Esq,, with seal, June 7, 1701^ ane? TERY Fig. I. The 1859 sale catalogue description of Kubla Khan. S.C. Puttick 573, p. 17 (detail) A fairly cursory examination of the contents of the Puttick catalogue reveals that it comprised at least the major portion of a collection of autographs formed by Ehzabeth Smith, widow of Thomas Smith, a Gloucestershire J.P. She was the daughter of Richard Chandler, a wealthy woolstapler who in 1750 had built Constitution House at the east end of Bell Lane in Gloucester, where she was born about 1770.^ Her husband, Thomas Smith, was a native of Cirencester who had trained as a barrister, but 'from an impediment of speech, did not make a public exercise of his profession'.^ The couple set up home first at Padhill and then at Bownhams, or Bownham House, both near Minchinhampton in Gloucestershire: later on they settled in a late eighteenth-century house at Easton Grey, near Malmesbury, in Wiltshire."^ Smith is described as well- informed and liberal-minded, 'a gentleman and philosopher in his pleasures and habits; a philanthropist and public character in his forms of living and acting'. He was apparently known as 'The Maecenas of his Neighbourhood'.^ After his death on 31 May 1822 his widow sought 'consolation in books and business, for she attends to the details of a farm which used to afford amusement and employment to him'.^ She was 'a person of much originahty of character... a Unitarian, and therefore not much in sympathy with the ordinary county and clerical society, but was intimate both at Bowood with Lord and Lady Lansdowne, and at Gatcombe with Mr. Ricardo. She had a large and valuable library and collection of autographs, which were sold and dispersed at her death [on 6 January 1859], for she hved to the great age of ninety-two.'^** Easton Grey and the other estates then passed by the terms of her husband's will to Graham Smith (d. 1871), eldest son of his cousin Richard. It was presumably he who arranged, with considerable dispatch, for the sale of her collection. Chandler's second wife, Mrs Smith's stepmother, was an early friend of Maria Edgeworth and the recipient of two letters of 1791 and 1792 that are listed in the Puttick catalogue (lots 214, 215).^^ In due course Mrs Smith formed an acquaintance with the novelist who, during a visit to Easton Grey in December 1820, wrote to her sister Honora in the most glowmg terms about the house and her hosts :^2 This house IS delightful - in a beautiful situation - with river - old trees - fine swells and vallies and soft verdure even at this time of the year...The house, convenient, comfortable, perfectly neat, without the teizing precision of order - the library-drawing-room furnished with good sense - delightful armchairs low sofas - stools, plenty of moveable tables - books on tables and in open book-cases and in short all that speaks the habits and affords the means of agreeable occupation. In short Easton Grey might be cited as a happy model of what an English country gentleman's house is or ought to be...Mrs. Smiths easy unaffected well bred kind manners and Mr. Smiths literary and sensible conversation make their house one of the most agreeable I ever saw. Last night he read to us from a book of manuscript treasures two admirable letters of Mackintosh written when he was in India and addressed to Mr Whishaw... Mr. Smith also shewed us some little unpublished poems of Lord Byrons and some notes of his in a copy of Scots Bards and Reviewers which do him honor and which Harriet has copied into our book so that you shall all see them - in time. Possibly she had by this time modified the view that she took in 1813 when viewing the Milton manuscript in Trinity College, Cambridge:' I have not such delight in seeing the hand-writing of great authors and great folk as some people have.'^^ During a further visit to Easton Grey in November 1821 she mentioned that the Smiths were 'connected by friendship with most of the literary people whom we know and with many whom we do not know-for instance Hobhouse - Burdett &c.'. The list also included Sydney Smith, Francis Horner, Smithson Tennant, Francis Wollaston, John Whishaw and Sir Samuel Romilly.^^ It is not surprising therefore to find both John Cam Hobhouse and his friend Byron represented in Mrs Smith's collection (lots 70 and 279), though the 'little unpublished poems' of Byron are not listed in there. It is difficult to identify his annotated copy of English Bards and Scots Reviewers (1809, etc.) with any of the two or three now known: possibly it was the one sent in October 1815 to Leigh Hunt, who is himself represented in the collection by a series of letters to the publisher William Button (lots 292-294).*^ Again, only one of the letters of Sir James Mackintosh (lot 353) seems to have been in Mrs Smith's hands at the time of her death. Clearly the collection suffered losses as well as gains over the years. The economist David Ricardo (lot 35), who lived at Gatcombe Park, near Stroud, had first met the Smiths at Haileybury early in May 1814. A letter that he wrote to T. R. Malthus on 18 December 1814 included a plea: I dined a little while ago at Mr. Smith's whom I first met at your house. Mrs. Smith told me that she had a collection of the hand writing of a great number of men who had distinguished themselves by their writings, and she wished that I would give her a letter of yours to add to her collection. Knowing that I had many which would not discredit you, I assented; but after I came home I thought I had no right to do it without your consent - which I hope you will not refuse. ^^ 186 The result was the addition of an interesting document challenging the views of John Stuart Mill on political economy (lot 355).^^ Clearly Mrs Smith's collection was already well supplied by this date: most probably, as will shortly be seen, she had begun it more than a decade earlier. Though this makes her one of the pioneers of the great age of autograph-hunting, coeval with William Upcott and Dawson Turner, she is not noticed by A.
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