Notes Prologue: Literary Life, 1815 1. Howard Mumford Jones, Revolution & Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 286n. 2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, with an introduction 'On Criticism and the "Biographia Literaria" , by Arthur Symons (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1906), p. x. 3. See Shorter Works and Fragments (CC), I, 625-85 (p. 625). 4. Holmes, Darker Reflections, p. 349. 5. 'My First Acquaintance with Poets', in William Hazlitt: Selected Writings, ed. Jon Cook (Oxford and New York: 1991), pp. 211-30 (pp. 212-13). 6. See, for example, amongst Coleridge's Collected Works, the two-volume Shorter Works and Fragments (CC). 7. ]. H. Haeger, 'Anti-Materialism, Autobiography, and the Abyss of Unmeaning in the Biographia Literaria', in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria: Text and Meaning, ed. Frederick Burwick (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989), pp. 75-87 (p. 77). 8. 'Seem to have made up my mind to write my metaphysical works, as my Life, & in my Life - intermixed with all the other events/ or history of the mind & fortunes of S. T. Coleridge' (September-October 1803), N237. 9. Jerome Christensen, ' "Like a Guilty Thing Surprised": Coleridge, Deconstruction, and the Apostasy of Criticism', in Coleridge's Biographia: Text and Meaning, ed. Burwick, pp. 171-90 (p. 185). 10. Wordsworth to Thomas Noon Talfourd, 11 April 1839, Wordsworth Letters: The Late Years 2, p. 969. 11. Wordsworth to Thomas De Quincey, 6 March 1804, Wordsworth Letters: The Early Years, p. 454. 12. See the opening line of 'The Two-Part Prelude of 1799', The Prelude, p. 1. 13. 'My nature requires another Nature for its support, & reposes only in another from the necessary Indigence of its Being', note of November 1803 (CN I, 1679). 14. M. G. Cooke, 'Quisque Sui Faber: Coleridge in the Biographia Literaria', Philological Quarterly 50 (April 1971), pp. 208-29 (p. 223). 15. Coleridge 'Biographia Literaria' Chapters I-IV, XIV-XXII, Wordsworth Prefaces and Essays on Poetry 1800-1815, ed. George Sampson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), p. v. 16. Compare Hazlitt: 'I observed that he continually crossed me on the way by shifting from one side of the foot-path to the other. This struck me at the time as an odd movement; but I did not at that time connect it with any instability of purpose or involuntary change of principle, as I have done since', 'My First Acquaintance with Poets', in Selected Writings, ed. Cook, p. 218. 215 216 Notes Chapter 1 'The Discipline of His Taste at School': Christ's Hospital and Cambridge 1. Gillman, pp. 4-5. 2. Holmes, Early Visions, p. 4. 3. For discussion of these and other forms of publishing in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, see William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 161-8. 4. Ashton, p. 16. 5. Gillman, pp. 17, 20. 6. Gillman, p. 20. 7. In a MS note amongst the Abinger papers, as quoted in Ashton, p. 14. 8. Wordsworth describes Newton 'Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone' in The Prelude (1850), III, 63. 9. In his 'On the Living Poets', in Lectures on the English Poets, published with The Spirit of the Age (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1910), pp. 143-68 (p. 167). 10. Coleridge in an article in The Courier, 15 July 1811, Essays on His Times (CC), II, 225-8 (p. 226). 11. See Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 18. 12. Holmes, Early Visions, p. 26. 13. Leigh Hunt, Autobiography, revised edition [1859], ed. J. E. Morpurgo (London: The Cresset Press, 1949), p. 56. 14. As quoted in Ashton, p. 19. 15. See, for example, Church and State (CC), pp. 46-7. 16. Lamb, 'Recollections of Christ's Hospital' (1813), in The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, in 6 vols (London: Methuen & Co., 1912), I, 162-74 (pp. 171, 172). 17. Charles Lamb, 'Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago' (1820), in The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, II, 14-26 (p. 15). 18. These figures, from the investigation of the parliamentary committee set up by Brougham in 1816, were released in 1819. See Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780-1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 45. For a contemporary account, listing 500 such schools, see Nicholas Carlisle, A Concise Description of the Endowed Grammar Schools in England and Wales (London, 1818). 19. Johnson's own 'Scheme for the Classes of a Grammar School', with its exclusively classical language teaching, is included by Boswell in his Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman, rev. J. D. Fleeman, World's Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 71-2. 20. From his syllabus for a school for boys in the Lake District, as quoted in Jennifer Wallace, Shelley and Greece: Rethinking Romantic Hellenism (London: Macmillan, 1997), p. 66. 21. See my entry under 'Dissenting Academies' in the Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age or, for more information, H[erbert] McLachlan, English Education under the Test Acts: Being the History of Non-conformist Academies 1662-1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1931). 22. As quoted in Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, revised edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 164. Notes 217 23. Kenneth Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (New York: Norton, 1998), p. 176. 24. See Britain on 'Education', in An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age, pp. 166, 168. For an astute contemporary account of the 'Public schools', see the article by the reviewer and wit Sydney Smith (himself an old boy of Winchester) in the Edinburgh Review XVI, no. 32 (August 1810), pp. 326-34. 25. Quoted in 'Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago', The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, II, 23-4. 26. Hunt, Autobiography, p. 74. 27. Coleridge's own account of the Christ's Hospital regime can be found in a letter to Thomas Poole, 19 February 1798, in the Collected Letters (CL 1,387-9). 28. Kenneth Curry, Southey (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), p.10. 29. Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit, pp. 19-20. 30. Lamb, 'Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago', The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, II, 24-5. 31. Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna, rev. B. S. Page (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), pp. 409-10 (V. 5, § 8). 32. John Milton, Of Education (1644), in Milton's Prose Writings, intro. K. M. Burton, Everyman's Library (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1958), p. 323. 33. 'You think it worth your while to hazard your son's innocence and virtue for a lit­ tle Greek and Latin?' In his Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1692), as quoted in S. J. Curtis, History of Education in Great Britain, fifth edition (London: University Tutorial Press, 1963), p. 114. 34. For the battle over working men's education, see E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), pp. 817-19. 35. Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age, p. 166. 36. E. P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. xiv. 37. R. D. Anderson, Education and the Scottish People 1750-1918 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), p. 2. 38. Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), p. 39. 39. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth, p. 129. 40. Holmes, Early Visions, p. 49. 41. Mr Collins is a foolish, fawning character in Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice. Chapter 2 'The Progress of His Opinions in Religion and Politics': The Radical Years 1. On 'primogeniture, which disinherits every other member of the family, to heap unwholesome abundance upon one', see William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 473. 2. As quoted in Gillman, p. 53. 3. Sors misera servorum in Insulis Indixi Occidentalis (The Unhappy Fate of the Slaves in the West Indian Islands'), ll. 45-56, as reprinted in Poetical Works (CC) I (Part I), pp. 72-84 (p. 77). 4. See Coleridge's essay 'Enthusiasm for an Ideal World' in The Friend (CC), I, 223. 218 Notes 5. 'The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America, 4 July 1776', as reprinted in Revolutions 1775-1830, ed. Merryn Williams (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), pp. 45-51 (p. 45). 6. Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, reprinted in Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy, ed. Marilyn Butler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 23-32 (p. 29). 7. Tom Paine, The Rights of Man, as reprinted in Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy, pp. 107-21 (pp. 110, 114-15). 8. See Ben Ross Schneider, Wordsworth's Cambridge Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), p. 143. 9. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France: A Critical Edition, ed.]. C. D. Clark (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 238. 10. Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, in Edmund Burke on Politics and Society, ed. B. W. Hill (London: Fontana, 1975), pp. 360-74 (pp. 373-4). 11. There are, needless to say, many more books devoted to this period of British and European history than it would be possible to list. See, amongst my suggestions for Further Reading at the end of this volume, works by Jennifer Mori, Ian R. Christie, R. K. Webb,]. Steven Watson, the volume of scholarly essays edited by H. T. Dickinson, and (for the European context) E. ]. Hobsbawm. Revolutions 1775-1830, ed. Merryn Williams (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971) offers a com­ prehensive anthology of excerpts from contemporary documents and treatises and two convenient anthologies of polemical and other responses to the French Revolution are available in Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy, ed.