Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 2: being The Biographical Supplement of Coleridge's Biographia LiterariaColeridge, Samuel Taylor
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Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 2: being The Biographical Supplement of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834 -- Correspondence
Pp. 311-35, vol. i, pp. 1-29 to "5th of February 1791" of this work.
335-38, " 30-34 to "destined to turn" of this work.
338-44, " 35-41 to "pantisocratical basis" of this work.
344-45, " 44-46 to "22nd of September 1794" of this work.
345-48, " 47-51 to "S. T. Coleridge" of this work.
348-50, " 53-56 to "expected" "
350-55, " 56-62 to "S. T. C." "
355-60, " 63-68 to "S. T. Coleridge" "
360-62, " 71-74 to "S.T. Coleridge" "
362-3, " 76-76 to "never arrived" "
363-77, " 77-92 to "latest convictions" "
377-86, " 96-105 to "S. C." o "
386-90, " 114-119 to "plaintive warbling" "
391, " 121 to "were written" "
391-411, vol. ii, 76-99 to "name behind" "
411-21, " 104-115 to "candid" "
422-25, " 280-284 to "_Demosius and Mystes_" of this work.
426-32, " 305-312 to "_Fall of Rora_" of this work.
_Cottle's Text._--Cottle has been severely blamed for tampering with the
text of the letters of Coleridge. The most glaring changes occur in
Letter 32, in which Cottle inserts the names of Lamb, Wordsworth and Dr.
Parr, and in Letter 123, in which he alters his own name for that of
Biggs, his partner. His changes consist mostly of omissions. Letters 99,
114, 117, 122, which are given in full in T. Litchfield's _Tom Wedgwood
the First Photographer_, are the principal sufferers from Cottle's
treatment. It cannot be said that these omissions amount to a serious
charge against Cottle. They were made to avoid bringing in the names of
people still alive or whose near relations might object to their names
figuring in a publication, and also to avoid obtruding Coleridge's
complaints about his ill-health and his own treatment into notice. His
tampering with the letters of Southey, in which he makes Southey say
what he never wrote, is not, of course, defensible (see Dykes Campbell's
_Life of Coleridge_, p. 204 _note_). Cottle's longest omission is in
Letter 99, to Wedgwood, where Coleridge quotes what Lamb had written to
him about Cottle's own poem _Alfred_ (see Ainger's _Letters of Lamb_, i,
138). The omission of such a passage was only to be expected; Cottle was
not going to act as his own hangman. Henry Nelson Coleridge, Thomas Noon
Talfourd, and even Canon Ainger, and indeed nearly all editors of
letters published during the first half of the nineteenth century, took
the liberty to discriminate what should be communicated to the public in
volumes such as Cottle's.
_Vol. I, p. 50._--The Summer of 1795 should be "the Autumn of 1794;" see
_Thomas Poole and his Friends_, I, 95.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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