Sara Coleridge (1802-1852) Poet, editor, translator, author of children's literature and fairy tales, Sara Coleridge, born on 22 December 1802 in Keswick, in the Lake District, was the only daughter and youngest child of Sara Fricker and Samuel Taylor Cole­ ridge. Because her parents were estranged for almost all of her childhood, she never lived with her father for much more than a few weeks at a time, and he sometimes allowed years to elapse between letters. While he lived in London, she lived with her mother in Greta Hall, in Keswick, the home of her uncle, Robert Southey. She would later admit that she had known both William Wordsworth and Southey better than she had known her father. Although her father was hardly an attentive parent, Sara did impress him; after his final visit to Keswick, in February 1812, he wrote of her: "Little Sara [then nine years old] ... reads French tolerably & Italian fluently, and I was astonished at her acquaintance with her native Language. The word 'hostile' occurring in what she read to me, I asked her what 'hostile' meant? And she answered at once-Why! inimical: only that inimical is more often used for things and measures, and not, as hostile is, to persons & nations .... [S]he is such a sweet-tempered, meek, blue-eyed Fairy, & so affectionate, trust­ worthy, & really serviceable!" 1 Before long, she was also learning Latin and Spanish (she would later learn Greek and German), continuing her voracious reading in the Southeys' extensive library, and becoming a talented musician. John Murray published her first book when she was nineteen, a three-volume translation from the Latin of Martin Dobrizhoffer's An Account of the Abi­ phones, an Equestrian People of Paraguay. Most of the money Murray gave her for the project went to help send her brother Derwent to Cambridge University. At the end of 1822, Sara's mother took her to London, where she spent three weeks of an eight-month trip in Highgate, getting to know her father. 1. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford, r956-7r), 3 :315. Sara Coleridge It was the first time she had seen him in a decade. On this same trip, in Janu­ ary 1823, she met her first cousin Henry Nelson Coleridge. Four years older than Sara and a graduate of King's College, Cambridge, he had just begun reading for the law. Before she left London the two had become secretly en­ gaged. The engagement was to last six and a half years, while he established himself in his profession; in the meantime, she translated for John Murray the memoirs of Chevalier Bayard from the sixteenth-century French. It was probably in this period, during a bout with depression, that she first began experimenting with opium as a sedative for sleep; she was certainly using it by October 1825. A month later she told her brother Derwent, "It has done me much good & no harm-and I might exclaim with Mrs O'Neil, 'Hail lovely blossom that can' st ease the wretched victims of disease.' " 2 When Sara and Henry married, on 3 September 1829, they moved to 21 Downshire Place, Hampstead, not far from her father's home at the Grove. Despite precarious health, including several serious physical and men­ tal breakdowns, she would spend nearly all of the next decade pregnant, depending upon opium increasingly heavily. Her son Herbert was born in October 1830 and her daughter Edith in July 1832. InJanuary 1834, after giving birth to twins who lived only a few days, she was overcome by severe depres­ sion; by the spring her opium use had become so heavy that she could not break herself of the habit. Even so, intellectual and literary pursuits became her haven, and she became increasingly interested in literary controversies, theological debates, and the works of women writers. She would eventually include in her circle of friends Joanna Baillie, Maria Jane Jewsbury, Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Anna Jameson, William Gladstone, Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Macaulay, and Henry Crabb Robinson. In the spring and summer of 1834 Sara Coleridge began writing short poems for the instruction of her children; they were published by J. W. Parker the following September as Pretty Lessons in Verse for Good Children. The book sold well, going through five editions in five years. "Poppies," printed below, appeared in that volume, a decision the poet came to regret because of family sensitivities on the subject. In July of that year her father died, and his death, ironically, gave her new purpose as a writer and editor. She assisted her hus­ band, his literary executor, in his edition of Coleridge's Table Talk (1835), edited her father's Literary Remains (4 vols., 1836-39) and became the driving but invisible force behind his eventual canonization. She began editing his Aids to Refl-ection and transcribing his marginalia. 2 . Quoted in Bradford Keyes Mudge, Sara Coleridge, A Victorian Daughter: Her Life and Essays (New Haven, 1989), J7. See also Henrietta O'Neill's "Ode to the Poppy" in this volume. 196 Sara Coleridge Meanwhile, she was working through her complex feelings about being a mother in the process of drafting her own imaginative work, Phantasmion, from which most of the poems below are taken. The setting is inspired by the wild and beautiful scenery of her childhood in the Lake District. Her protagonist is Phantasmion, the young prince of Palmland, told in a garden of his mother's death; shortly thereafter he witnesses the death of a com­ panion and then loses his father. A fairy, Potentilla, queen of the insects, grants his requests for wings and suction feet; the tale relates his adventures as he pursues Iarine, beautiful daughter of the king of Rockland. Phantas­ mion's complex world is filled with good, evil, and capricious spirits who intervene in the military conflicts and love relationships of mortals. The tale treats love, ambition, hatred, fallibility, and madness in a lush and vivid prose style filled with sensuous images of the exotic and fantastic. Poems record the innermost feelings of the characters. In a letter to her husband of 29 Sep­ tember 1837 Coleridge admits that her chief aim in Phantasmion was not a moral but consisted "in cultivating the imagination, and innocently gratify­ ing the curiosity of the reader, by exhibiting the general and abstract beauty of things through the vehicle of a story, which, as it treats of human hopes, and fears, and passions, and interests, and of those changeful events and vary­ ing circumstances to which human life is liable, may lend an animation to the accompanying descriptions, and in return receive a lustre from them." 3 She expresses a similar view in a verse written in her own copy of Phantasmion: Go, little book, and sing of love and beauty, To tempt the worldling into fairy-land; Tell him that airy dreams are sacred duty, Bring better wealth than aught his toils command, - Toils fraught with mickle harm. But if thou meet some spirit high and tender, On blessed works and noblest love intent. Tell him that airy dreams of nature's splendor, With graver thoughts and hallowed musings blent, Prove no too earthly charm.4 The book was published anonymously in June 1837 to mostly positive notices. The Quarterly Review observed that " 'Phantasmion' is not a poem, but it is poetry from beginning to end, and has many poems within it. It is one of a race that has particularly suffered under the assaults of political economy 3. Quoted in Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge, ed. [Edith Coleridge], 2 vols. (London, 1873), l: 191. 4. Written about 1845 and quoted in ibid., I :175. Sara Coleridge and useful knowledge;-a Fairy Tale, the last, we suppose, that will ever be written in England, and unique in its kind. It is neither German nor French. It is what it is-pure as crystal in diction, tinted like an opal with the hues of an everspringing sunlit fancy." 5 But as Sara Coleridge noted, "In these days ... to print a Fairy Tale is the very way to be not read, but shoved aside with contempt. I wish, however, I were only as sure that my fairy-tale is worth printing, as I am that works of this class are wholesome food, by way of variety, for the childish mind." 6 Sara Coleridge continued to write reviews (published anonymously in the Quarterly Review), essays, and poetry, but her major project for the rest of her life was editing her father's works and remaking his image-from that of the dissolute, self-indulgent, plagiarizing poet into the respected philosopher and Victorian sage. She painstakingly assembled a fragmentary and miscel­ laneous corpus into what Leslie Stephen called the "centre of intellectual life in England." Virginia Woolf said that Sara Coleridge "found her father [by editing his works] as she had not found him in the flesh; and she found that he was herself." 7 Coleridge included with each new work she edited a substantial introduction or appendix defending, explaining, or qualifying her father's theories. An early biographer, Henry Reed, justly observed that she "expended in the desultory form of notes, and appendices, and prefaces, an amount of original thought and an affluence of learning, which, differently and more prominently presented, would have made her famous." 8 Henry Coleridge's· death on 25 January 1843 made Sara's income from writing even more necessary. Within the next few years she would com­ plete what are now considered her two most significant editing projects-the 1847 edition of the Biographia Literaria and the 1850 edition of Essays on His Own Times.