BIB_ID
116611
Accession number
MA 1857.21
Creator
Underwood, Thomas Richard, 1772-1835.
Display Date
London, England, 1801 June 5.
Credit line
Purchased from Joanna Langlais, 1957.
Description
1 item (4 pages) ; 23.6 x 18.7 cm
Notes
This collection, MA 1857, includes seventeen autograph letters signed from various correspondents to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, three autograph letters signed to Robert Southey, one each from Edward Coleridge, John Taylor Coleridge and Sara Fricker Coleridge and two autograph letters signed from William Wordsworth, one to Robert Southey and one to Joseph Henry Green. This collection of letters dates from 1794-1834.
This letter is from the Joanna Langlais Collection, a large collection of letters written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge to various recipients. The collection has been divided into subsets, based primarily on Coleridge's addressees, and these sub-collections have been cataloged individually as MA 1848- MA 1857.
Written from "43 Lambs Conduit Street."
This letter is from the Joanna Langlais Collection, a large collection of letters written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge to various recipients. The collection has been divided into subsets, based primarily on Coleridge's addressees, and these sub-collections have been cataloged individually as MA 1848- MA 1857.
Written from "43 Lambs Conduit Street."
Provenance
Purchased from Joanna Langlais in 1957 as a gift of the Fellows with the special assistance of Mrs. W. Murray Crane, Mr. Homer D. Crotty, Mr. and Mrs. Donald F. Hyde, Mr. Robert H. Taylor and Mrs. Landon K. Thorne. Formerly in the possession of Ernest Hartley Coleridge and Thomas Burdett Money-Coutts, Baron Latymer.
Summary
Asking his opinion of Mary Hays; saying "You will perhaps be able to recollect being introduced by Rough to a girl a[t] Cambridge whom he had brought from London, and with whom in company you dined with in Covent garden and who at that dinner recited some line by Bowles. You afterwards called to see her in Berwick Street. Now what I wish to know is what situation of life (as to be sincere what degree of infamy) she appeared at that time to be plunged in whether her behavior evinced any thing like modesty or dejection at her situation and above all if not a subject to delicate to urge you on as it realy is of importance for me [to] know did that sort of intercourse take place between you which considering your habits of life at that period might be expected and from the situation I have every reason to fear she was in is more than probable. From the knowledge I have of your sincerity I am enduced to urge these questions which are far from being the effects of idle curiosity. When I have the happiness of seeing you if you wish to know my motives for asking them I will most sincerely tell you. I now hope you will do me the favour to answer them with all convenient speed and that you will pardon the apparent impertinence and waste of your time;" expressing his happiness at the success of Davy's public lectures; adding that if he can "...execute any commissions for you or bring you any books I will most gladly do it. use no ceremony;" adding, in a postscript, "I hope [you] will be able to understand this as the letter I had written when I came to the Royal Institution to give Davy the frank I paid I had forgotten to put in it & this has been written in such haste that when I read it over I was ashamed of the inexcusable obsenity of it."
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