INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

HE BOLLINGEN EDITION of 's collected works poses Tsomething of a challenge to the image of Coleridge as an author who was eternally promising but never fulfilling his promises, rich in projects but poor in actual publications, an "omni-pregnant, nihili-parturient ge­ nius" as he ruefully called himself in the 1812 Omniana. 1 It now looks as though the edition will be complete in thirty volumes, of which fifteen will present texts that Coleridge published in his lifetime, five will pre­ sent texts (including lectures) that he hoped to publish and to some ex­ tent prepared for publication, and eight will deal with the more informal utterances of the marginalia and table-talk. The two volumes of Shorter Works and Fragments are a sort of microcosm of the whole. They con­ tain essays, reviews, and pamphlets that Coleridge himself saw into print; more sustained works, such as the "Theory of Life" and "Con­ fessions of an Inquiring Spirit'', that were finished enough to be brought out posthumously by friends and family; papers associated with work in progress; and a variety of occasional and personal documents that were never intended for publication. A significant quantity of the materials included here consists of work that Coleridge did on behalf of others, not only literary advice solicited from him by anxious authors, but also language lessons for young Coleridges and Gillmans, anonymous polit­ ical pamphlets supporting the cause of children who worked long hours in cotton factories, medical essays and reviews written for James Gill­ man to publish as his own, and drafts of lectures-on subjects ranging from aesthetics to comparative anatomy-to be delivered by Joseph Henry Green. Given the miscellaneous character of these volumes, it is impractical to survey the contents or supply a uniform context in a general introduc­ tion. The materials have been arranged chronologically, as far as pos­ sible, according to the principles outlined in "Editorial Practice" (xxix below), and the headnote for each entry attempts to provide an appro­ priate context for that particular entry. Something may be said, how­ ever, about the origins of Shorter Works and Fragments.

1 295 below. xxiii xxiv Shorter Works and Fragments

Coleridge rather surprisingly accepted and even fostered his reputa­ tion as a good starter but bad finisher. In the 1808 Prospectus to the Friend. he admitted "that the Number of my unrealized Schemes, and the Mass of my miscellaneous Fragments. have often furnished my Friends •.vith a subject of Raillery, and sometimes of Regret and Re­ proof" (Friend-CC-n 16). Among the ralliers and teasers was his old friend Charles Lamb, who wrote a joking Jetter on Christmas Day 1815, in which he reported Coleridge's death, adding. "It is said he has left behind him more than forty thousand treatises in criticism and meta­ physics, but few of them in a state of completion" (L Work.i VI 481 ). So the legend grew, Coleridge himself writing to correspondents about "my Book and Paper Closet or rather Wilderness" and confessing after an illness, "I do not know which is in the greater litter & confusion­ my head or my Room"

1 N&Q NS VIII (1853) 43. IX (1854) Philosophy (1865). based on C's teach- 543--4. After giving up the philosophical ings. remains. Green wrote his own Spiritual Introduction and Acknowledgments xxv

Some of the materials included in this collection, then, were first pub­ lished in Literary Remains; some must have been destined originally for Green's unfinished edition. It was not until many years after the "fam­ ily" editors had completed their work, of course, that the Coleridge manuscripts were purchased by public institutions and bound up in such important sets as the British Library MSS Egerton 2800 and 2801, and its Additional MS 34225. When the Bollingen Edition was planned in the late 1950s, indepen­ dent editions of Coleridge's letters and notebooks were already under way. Following their example and dividing Coleridge's manuscripts by kind rather than by subject or date or any other category, the Bollingen editors agreed that the marginalia constituted a substantial enough body of work to be treated as a separate title; the manuscript "Logic", "Philosophical Lectures", and "Opus Maximum" were also assigned a volume each. Of the remaining manuscript material, it was expected that some-particularly the poetry-would be taken into other volumes in the series, and that Shorter Works and Fragments would be a catch­ all for unattached manuscript fragments as well as the published works and complete works left in manuscript that were not long enough to require a volume to themselves. (Appendix B lists manuscripts that may have been by Coleridge or attributed to him, but that are not published here either because the attribution is doubtful or because they appear in other volumes in the series.) The edition of Shorter Works and Fragments was originally under­ taken by E. E. Hostetter, who transcribed manuscripts in the British Li­ brary, assembled texts, and prepared draft introductions for a few of the shorter works, notably the ''Essays on Genial Criticism'', the ·'Treatise on Method", and the pamphlets concerned with Sir Robert Peel's Bill to reduce the working hours of factory children. After he transferred the edition to the present editors in 1972 we continued his work, canvassing libraries and collectors around the world; transcribing manuscripts and collating all transcriptions with the originals; corresponding with other editors about the disposal of specific items; and arranging and annotating our text as it took shape. For the purposes of annotation, we divided the work by subject areas, H. J. Jackson being chiefly responsible for liter­ ary projects, personal documents, journalism and political writings, and science and medicine, and J. R. de J. Jackson for juvenilia, aesthetics, theology, and philosophy. Coleridge's writings seldom lend themselves to simple classification, however-remarks about latent heat or Peruvian bark are no surprise in a philosophical text, nor recommendations about logical method in an address to students of surgery-and we have read xxvi Shorter Works and Fragments over and contributed freely to one another's work. A distinct group of classical materials, mostly exercises in Greek and Latin designed for the use of Gillman or Coleridge children, has been prepared by Lorna Ar­ nold, the classical consultant for the Notebooks and Collected Works, and her name is given as "coeditor" in the headnotes to items from that group. Her contributions to the annotation of "On the Prometheus of Aeschylus" and its appendix have been particularly substantial. An edition on this scale could not be completed even by two people working for almost twenty years in the time that could be spared from teaching and other responsibilities, without a great deal of support from institutions and individuals. We have both been given substantial finan­ cial support for research time and travelling expenses by the Social Sci­ ences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and by the Princeton University Press, and funds for typing and supplies from the Humanities and Social Sciences Board of the Office of Research Administration at the University of Toronto. The Edwin Cassidy Memorial Fund of Trinity College, University of Toronto, enabled us to hire undergraduate assis­ tants for proofreading. Victoria College, in the University of Toronto, continues generously to house not only Victoria's Coleridge Collection but also our invaluable home base, the Coleridge Office. For the texts themselves we have generally been dependent on the co­ operation of the owners, whose generosity we gratefully acknowledge. A small number of Coleridge papers are still in the hands of private collectors-Kathleen Coburn, Mrs T. S. Eliot, Ashley W. Olmsted, and Professor Paul Betz--who have been most gracious in their assistance. The main body of the extant manuscripts, however, is to be found in institutions. The libraries that hold Coleridge manuscripts are identified in the headnotes. We have been able to visit most of them, and it is a pleasure to recall the friendly courtesy of library staff on both sides of the Atlantic: at Dr Williams's Library, the library of the Royal College of Surgeons of , and the Wellcome Institute Library in London; at the beautiful Wordsworth Library in Grasmere; at Jesus College, Cambridge; at Liverpool University; in Canada, at the University of Wa­ terloo and the Redpath Library of McGill University; and across the bor­ der, at the Fales Collection of New York University, the Pierpont Mor­ gan Library, and the great Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, all in New York; at Princeton University Library, the Words­ worth Collection of Cornell University Library, the Rare Books Depart­ ment of the William R. Perkins Library of Duke University, the Bei­ necke Rare Books Library at Yale University, the Houghton Library at Introduction and Acknowledgments xxvii

Harvard, the Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin, and the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino. Most im­ portant of all are the collections we have come to take for granted-the resources of the University of Toronto Library system as a whole, and particularly the help we have had from Richard Landon and Philip Old­ field in the Fisher Rare Books Library; the Coleridge Collection in the Victoria College Library, genially supervised by Robert Brandeis; and the incomparable British Library, especially the Department of Manu­ scripts and the North Library, where the staff have carried on with un­ varied good will through tile disturbances of many years-strikes, cut­ backs, construction, and the prohibition of ink. As far as individuals are concerned, our first debt in time as in impor­ tance is to E. E. Bostetter, who gave us his collection of photographs of the British Library manuscripts, his preliminary tra:1scriptions, and the draft annotations described earlier. In this work he had been assisted by Jack Haeger, now Professor of English at San Jose. Lore Metzger, of Emory University, published an edition of Coleridge's "Vindication of Spinoza" which is the basis of that work here. Our colleagues in the Coleridge edition have been an unfailing resource both in person and through their work, especially the General Editor, Kathleen Coburn; the Associate Editor, Bart Winer, whose death in February 1989 was a se­ vere blow; George Whalley, editor of the Marginalia until his death in May 1983, from whom we inherited some "quasi-marginalia"; R. A. Foakes, editor of Lectures 1808-1819: On Literature; Carl Woodring, of the Table Talk; John Beer, of Aids to Reflection; Jim Mays, of Poeti­ cal Works; and Anthony Harding, who is preparing Volume Five of the Notebooks. Our more than copy-editor, John Was, is newly associated with the Collected Works; only the editors can fully appreciate how much he has done to remove error and improve consistency. The debts of friendship can only be recorded. Trevor Levere has been invariably patient and knowledgeable in all areas having to do with the history of science. Michael Millgate added unnecessarily to his own work when he took our waif transcripts with him on a trip to Kentucky. We have pestered Marian Rothstein with enquiries, some quite remote from her expertise in French. John Bosher helped with French Revolu­ tionary lore, and Bill Halewood found a quotation that had stumped us in Samuel Johnson. For day-to-day support we have been fortunate in being able to call first of all on Freda Gough, secretary to Kathleen Co­ bum until 1988, and then on Rea Wilmshurst, whose responsibility is really for the marginalia but who smuggles in a shorter work now and xxvm Shorter Works and Fragments then. Other colleagues near and far--Geoffrey Arnold, Eleanor Cook, John Drury, Marion Faber, Andre Gombay, John E. Grant, Patrick Gray, N. A. Halmi, David Hoeniger, Hilton Kelliher, A.M. Leggatt. C. J. McDonough, Craig Miller, Franco Nasi, Michael Petry, P. H. Quarrie, Eric Rothstein, and David Smith-enabled us to cope with the demands of a polymath, often by being polymathic themselves.

Toronto H. J. JACKSON AND J. R. DE J. JACKSON October 1989