Table Of ContentNineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters
Series Editor: Marilyn Gaull
This series presents original biographical, critical, and scholarly studies of literary
works and public figures in Great Britain, North America, and continental Europe
during the nineteenth century. The volumes in Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and
Letters evoke the energies, achievements, contributions, cultural traditions, and
individuals who reflected and generated them during the Romantic and Victorian
periods. The topics: critical, textual, and historical scholarship, literary and book his-
tory, biography, cultural and comparative studies, critical theory, art, architecture,
science, politics, religion, music, language, philosophy, aesthetics, law, publication,
translation, domestic and public life, popular culture, and anything that influenced,
impinges upon, expresses or contributes to an understanding of the authors, works,
and events of the nineteenth century. The authors consist of political figures, art-
ists, scientists, and cultural icons including William Blake, Thomas Hardy, Charles
Darwin, William Wordsworth, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and
their contemporaries.
The series editor is Marilyn Gaull, PhD (Indiana University), FEA. She has taught
at William and Mary, Temple University, New York University, and is research profes-
sor at the Editorial Institute at Boston University. She is the founder and editor of
The Wordsworth Circle and the author o f English Romanticism: The Human Context ,
and editions, essays, and reviews in journals. She lectures internationally on British
Romanticism, folklore, and narrative theory, intellectual history, publishing proce-
dures, and history of science.
PUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE MACMILLAN:
Shelley’s German Afterlives, by Susanne Schmid
Coleridge, the Bible, and Religion, by Jeffrey W. Barbeau
Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter, by Peter J. Kitson
Byron, edited by Cheryl A. Wilson
Romantic Migrations , by Michael Wiley
The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles, by Matthew Schneider
British Periodicals and Romantic Identit y, by Mark Schoenfield
Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism, by Clare Broome Saunders
British Victorian Women’s Periodicals, by Kathryn Ledbetter
Romantic Diasporas , by Toby R. Benis
Romantic Literary Families, by Scott Krawczyk
Victorian Christmas in Print , by Tara Moore
Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature ,
edited by Monika Elbert and Marie Drews
Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print , by Alberto Gabriele
Romanticism and the Object , edited by Larry H. Peer
Poetics en passant, by Anne Jamison
From Song to Print, by Terence Hoagwood
Gothic Romanticism , by Tom Duggett
Victorian Medicine and Social Reform , by Louise Penner
Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel , by James P. Carson
Byron and the Rhetoric of Italian Nationalism , by Arnold A. Schmidt
Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America , by Shira Wolosky
The Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction , by Annette Cozzi
Romanticism and Pleasure , edited by Thomas H. Schmid and Michelle Faubert
Royal Romances , by Kristin Flieger Samuelian
Trauma, Transcendence, and Trust , by Thomas J. Brennan, S.J.
The Business of Literary Circles in Nineteenth-Century America , by David Dowling
Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain , by Clare A. Simmons
Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism , by Ashton Nichols
The Poetry of Mary Robinson , by Daniel Robinson
Romanticism and the City , by Larry H. Peer
Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination , by Gregory Leadbetter
Dante and Italy in British Romanticism , edited by Frederick Burwick and Paul
Douglass
Jewish Representation in British Literature 1780–1840 , by Michael Scrivener
Romantic Dharma , by Mark Lussier
Robert Southey , by Stuart Andrews
Playing to the Crowd , by Frederick Burwick
The Regions of Sara Coleridge’s Thought , by Peter Swaab
FORTHCOMING TITLES:
John Thelwall and the Wordsworth Circle , by Judith Thompson
Wordsworth and Coleridge , by Peter Larkin
Turning Points in Natural Theology from Bacon to Darwin , by Stuart Peterfreund
Sublime Coleridge , by Murray Evans
The Regions of Sara
Coleridge’s Thought
Selected Literary Criticism
Peter Swaab
THE REGIONS OF SARA COLERIDGE’S THOUGHT
Copyright © Peter Swaab, 2012.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-62367-5
All rights reserved.
First published in 2012 by
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registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
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Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
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the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-38501-0 ISBN 978-1-137-01160-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137011602
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the
Library of Congress.
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Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: January 2012
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments v ii
Introduction i x
List of Abbreviations xxxiii
Textual Note xxxv
1 Sara Coleridge on Sara Coleridge 1
2 Sara Coleridge on Samuel Taylor Coleridge and
on Editing Samuel Taylor Coleridge 29
3 Sara Coleridge in Editions of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 4 9
4 Sara Coleridge on William Wordsworth 83
5 Sara Coleridge Writing for the Q uarterly Review 1 01
6 Sara Coleridge on the Literature of Earlier Times 115
7 Sara Coleridge on Her Contemporaries 129
Notes 203
Further Reading 217
Index of Recipients 223
Index 225
Acknowledgments
The research for this book was supported by a Research Leave award
from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). It was
also supported by a Mellon Fellowship awarded by the Harry Ransom
Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. I
am very grateful to both institutions.
Manuscript holdings at the Jerwood Centre are quoted by kind
permission of the Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage, Cumbria. Those
in the HRC are quoted by kind permission of the Harry Ransom
Humanities Research Center. I should like to thank the staff of both
libraries, and in particular Richard Workman and Pat Fox at the
Ransom Center, and Jeff Cowton and Rebecca Turner at the Jerwood
Centre. For permission to quote Sara Coleridge’s marginal annota-
tion to “Poppies” in Dora Wordsworth’s copy of P retty Lessons in
Verse , I am grateful to Ruth Lightbourne of the Alexander Turnbull
Library, Wellington, New Zealand.
Marilyn Gaull, the general editor of the series in which this book
appears, has been an encouraging friend and crucial enabler of the
project from its beginnings.
I would like to thank colleagues at the 2008 and 2010 Coleridge
Summer Conferences for their questions, advice, and encouragement,
and Nicholas Roe, the conference director, in particular. I am also
grateful to many friends and academic colleagues for various kinds
of help: Rosemary Ashton, James Ball, Frederick Burwick, Martha
Campbell, Jonathan Crewe, Gregory Dart, Pat Fox, Tim Fulford,
Vanessa Guignery, Judith Hawley, Philip Horne, Kevin Jackson,
Danny Karlin, Alison Light, James Mays, Charlotte Mitchell, Howard
Moss, Jacqueline Munoz, Beth Newman, Ruth Perry, Christopher
Ricks, Ivy Schweitzer, Hannah Slapper, Heidi Thomson, Alan Vardy,
Katie Waldegrave, Joanne Wilkes, Barbara Will, and Melissa Zeiger.
Thanks above all to Andrew McDonald for indispensable support and
for many vital contributions to the book, including its cover design.
“No work is so inadequately rewarded either by money or credit
as that of editing miscellaneous, fragmentary, immethodical lit
viii Acknowledgments
remains like those of STC,” Sara Coleridge grumbled to her diary
in 1848. As these acknowledgments show, I’ve been luckier; but I
know what she means, and it seems best to end with a tribute to Sara
Coleridge herself, whose admirable mind and character have made
this project truly rewarding.
Introduction
Sara Coleridge was among the best literary critics of the early Victorian
years. Her prolific prose writings show exceptional reach of thought,
cultural breadth, accuracy, and depth of judgment; she had “great
natural endowments and really astonishing attainments,” 1 in the
words of her admiring antagonist Thomas De Quincey. Other voices
add powerful encomia. Hartley Coleridge, for instance, was familial
but not only familial, modest but not only modest when he judged
that of all Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s talented offspring “Sara is the
inheritrix of his mind and of his genius.” 2 Aubrey de Vere concurred,
in more romantic idiom: “Her father had looked down into her eyes,
and left in them the light of his own.” 3 Elizabeth Barrett thought she
“possesses more learning, in the strict sense, than any female writer
of the day.”4 Hartley praised her “Essay on Rationalism” (included
in Aids to Reflection ) as “a wonder. I say not a wonder of a woman’s
work – where lives the man that could have written it? None in Great
Britain since our Father died.”5 A century later Edmund Blunden
“doubted whether any finer philosopher (or reasoner) can be found
among Englishwomen.” 6 She deserves to be seen, without these gen-
der caveats, as one of the most powerful philosophical thinkers of
the early Victorian period. Even De Quincey, whom she sought to
confute in the 1847 B iographia , regarded “her mode of argument
as unassailable.” 7 In true Coleridgean style she brings a searching
conceptual intelligence to her literary criticism, always referring her
judgments to the criteria of value on which they depend.
Such attainments sound impressive, but not exactly lively. But Sara *
is also a trenchant, opinionated, and often funny writer, especially in
the private correspondence from which most of this edition is drawn.
Her social circle was wide and cultured, and she was an avid reader
of the publications of her day. Like Henry Crabb Robinson’s diaries,
* Many Coleridges feature in this story, and in the interests of brevity and dis-
ambiguation I generally refer to Sara Coleridge as “Sara” or “SC,” and her father as
“STC.”
