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INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS HE BOLLINGEN EDITION of Coleridge'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" <CL IV 939. vi 585). Before he died in 1834. however. leaving behind probably no more disorder than writers usually leave, Coleridge made thoughtful provision for his books and manu scripts. He was exceptionally fortunate in his executors. Joseph Henry Green, whom Coleridge named in his will as his literary executor. was able to retire from his practice as a surgeon and devote himself to his executorship after the death of his father in 1834. In col laboration with Sara and Henry Nelson Coleridge, Derwent Coleridge, and James and Anne Gillman, he collected. transcribed. and sorted doc uments in the initial phase of a process of organising and publishing Coleridge's writings that has continued to this day. The first fruits of their collaboration were the four volumes of Literary Remains (1836- 9). edited by Henry Nelson Coleridge and dedicated to Green. There followed new editions of such major works as Aids to Reflection ( 1839, 1843) and Biographia Literaria ( 1847); separate publication of substan tial works left in manuscript; and specialised siftings of the materials of the notebooks and marginalia in Notes and Lectures on Shakespeare (1849). Notes on E11g/ish Di\'ines (1853). and Notes, Theological, Po litical. and Miscellaneous ( 1853). Green himself was entrusted with the editing of a counterpart to Literary Remains, ·'Philosophical Remains'', but as time went on and he continued to be active in the piecemeal pub lication of Coleridge's writings, he came to feel that Coleridge's ideas were sufficiently available in works already in print.' and he abandoned the project of the philosophical remains, leaving behind an introductory essay which is published in this edition for the first time (Appendix A). 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