A STRAY NOTEBOOK OF MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS BY COLERIDGE HILTON KELLIHER THE passing of Samuel Taylor Coleridge on 25 July 1834 was deeply felt among the circle of his friends, but nowhere more keenly perhaps than in the household of Dr and Mrs James Gillman at No. 3 The Grove, Highgate. For the last eighteen years of his life the Gillmans had acted not merely as his hosts but as his closest companions, friends, confidants and staunch admirers, providing him with the stable and comfortable home life that had till then so conspicuously been wanting (fig. i). Following the death of Gillman himself in June 1839 it was the chief consolation of his widow Anne to dwell on earlier days and to display her memorabilia of the sage of Highgate to visitors from as far afield as America. Amongst the rest were some appreciative notices that included an autograph sonnet on Coleridge composed by the painter Washington Allston, whose well-known portrait was one of the family's treasured possessions.^ Another seems to have been the following set of verses: Think stranger of some being from above Full of high genius, eloquence and love. Yet as an infant humble; thou mayst so. What Coleridge was, conjecture, canst not know. A copy of this epigram is inscribed on the first flyleaf of an oblong black leather- bound notebook that recently came to light among a miscellaneous lot of items purchased in a London auction-house.^ The simple attribution to 'Carey' suggests that the author of these lines was the Reverend Henry Francis Cary, the translator of Dante, who had been a close friend of the poet ever since they met and fell to discussion of Homer on the beach at Littlehampton in 1822. It serves to introduce a collection of Coleridge's prose writings, some of which are apparently unknown from any other source, that runs to 90 pages and is copied in a hand not recognisable as that of any member of his immediate circle. The same page carries a later statement of provenance in pencil that reads T S Colenso / nee Bunyon / to S D C. This anonymous jotting suflices to identify an early owner as Frances Sarah Bunyon (1816-93), wife from 1846 of John William Colenso (1814 83), later Bishop of Natal, who was to be in equal measure acclaimed and execrated both as a historical critic of the Pentateuch and as a champion of the Zulu people. From comparison of the main hand in the notebook with some 136 C/D C •T3 . -• OO I—I 1) bo bo bO 3 u o "o - U -.; 13 O bo U bo O items of correspondence that are to be found in the Library of RhodesHouse, Oxford, Frances Bunyon proves also to have been the transcriber.^ Who the eventual recipient of such a valuable gift may have been it is not so far possible to say, and even the date of presentation is unknown. Some member of the Colenso or Coleridge families would naturally seem the likeliest candidate, but unfortunately no one from the right period who bore the initials S.D.C. has yet come to light in either. At any rate, whoever received it was probably responsible for the statement of provenance noted above, and seems to have studied the contents attentively, marking passages in pencil and adding a few observations at various points. At some subsequent date it passed through the hands of a bookseller who wrote 'Coleridge', with the price one guinea, on the same flyleaf. The best published source for details concerning Frances Bunyon, the compiler of this small but interesting collection, is the introduction to Wyn Rees's Colenso Letters from Natal (Pietermaritzburg, 1958), an edition of letters that she wrote between 1865 and 1893, compiled from the Colenso papers housed in the Campbell Library of Africana at Durban and in the Natal Archives. She was the eldest child of Robert John Bunyon who had started his business career in 1811 by entering the family wine- business in Tower Street, London."*^ In 1831 he and his brother William entertained a merger, and under the name of Bunyon and Lynch diversified into the supply of coal. Presumably the total disappearance of this new firm from the Post Office London Directory after 1834 indicates that it had by then ceased trading, though the reasons for this can only be guessed at. Bunyon himself eventually secured a new position through his father-in-law Thomas Bignold, founder and head of the Norwich Union Insurance Company, for by 1836 he was acting as its Secretary at the head office in London. From this time he is said to have resided for the greater part of each year at No. 6 The Crescent, New Bridge Street in Blackfriars, with his wife Frances, son and three daughters. All the Bunyon children received sound, not to say expensive, educations, Charles passing eventually from Harrow to Cambridge while the daughters attended an academy for young ladies in Cheltenham. Here due attention was paid to their accomplishments: Frances was tutored in the piano and her sister Harriette in the harp by Gustavus Valentin(e) Hoist, grandfather of the famous composer, while Harriette, at least, studied watercolour drawing under Cornelius Varley and Henry Gastineau. The religious ethos of the Bunyon family was, in common with that of their Norwich relatives, evangelical; though like many another child in the first flush of discovering herself and her powers Frances came at the age of fourteen to express doubts about some of the basic theological tenets of Christianity: 'I cannot love the Saviour or feel that he is my Saviour nor even feel the weight of my sins.' The fact that she felt able to confide these doubts to her mother shows just how great a strength of love and understanding existed within the family. The parental finances were, however, of a somewhat shakier order, and much money was lost in unsuccessful ventures in South Wales iron and in mines. All the same, when Frances's father died in 1844 at the age of fifty-six her mother, her sister Ellen and she, though doubtless 138 somewhat reduced in circumstances, were by no means destitute. Her brother Charles had already begun a legal career by entering the Inner Temple, and Harriette had become the wife of Francis Thomas McDougall, the future Bishop of Labuan, in July 1843. At about the same time Frances became engaged to the brilliant but impecunious young Cornish fellow of St John's, Cambridge, whose presentation to the college living of Forncett St Mary in Norfolk finally enabled them to marry on 8 January 1846 at St George's, Bloomsbury. In addition to considerable prowess as a mathematician, Colenso's talents as a preacher were noted by his Cambridge contemporaries: it is said, however, that at the time of their first meeting his future wife was the better metaphysician of the two. Her early inclination this way is amply documented; and although it is not known exactly when she first became familiar with the writings of Coleridge, in 1837, at the age of twenty-one, she wrote to her brother in Cambridge that Lay Sermons and The Constitution of the Church and State were 'really quite necessary for a young man to possess'. Her close acquaintance with the writings of F. D. Maurice also predated her first encounter with her future husband, who came to share her admiration for them. As she later recalled:^ ... it is true enough that I first turned his attention to the study of Coleridge and then of Maurice. I shall never forget finding him one morning, an hour before breakfast time . with a volume of Maurice in his hands, and his whole soul in his face, as it often was, with a wrapt assent and consent to what he had been reading, and a full conviction that he would find perfect sympathy on this point in mt—the foundation indeed of all our sympathy and love. It was through Frances also that he became personally acquainted with Maurice, joining the band of friends and disciples that included Charles Kingsley and Tom Hughes, and striking up a lifelong friendship with Arthur Stanley, later Dean of Westminster. Sadly, the publication in 1862-3 of The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua critically examined was to cost him that of his old mentor.^ Frances's own friendship with Maurice came about through her admiration for Coleridge. During the summer months of each year it was the custom of the Bunyon family to obtain some respite from the scurry of the business district by renting houses in the country or in the suburbs, and this habit seems to have extended to other seasons also. By March 1842 they were occupying one of the dozen or so large houses in Hornsey Lane, Highgate, that were becoming increasingly sought after as retreats for city merchants.'' It was from here that, following the appearance of a new edition of Maurice's The Kingdom of Christ, in which he acknowledged his debts to Coleridge, she had summoned up the courage to write to the author.^ In this letter she expressed the hope that he might see fit to write a little tract as 'an answer to the sickening ques- tions, "What has Coleridge done.^" "Why do you look on him with such love and reverence?" '—criticisms that were clearly all too familiar to early admirers of the sage. In particular she may have had in mind here the unenchanted view of his metaphysical speculations as *a thrice-refined pabulum of transcendental moonshine' that was 139 entertained by Thomas Carlyle, another of her personal acquaintances.^ Maurice's belated reply elicited, probably in the late spring or summer of that year, an invitation to visit the Bunyons in Highgate, employing as bait something that may have proved an irresistible temptation to him: Since I came to Highgate I have had the privilege of making Mrs.