BIB_ID
415167
Accession number
MA 1848.22
Creator
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834.
Display Date
Bristol, England, 1797 December 7.
Credit line
Purchased from Joanna Langlais, 1957.
Description
1 item (2 pages, with address) ; 22.4 x 18.6 cm
Notes
Coleridge gives "Thursday Morning" for the day of writing and the letter is postmarked December 8, 1797. In 1797, December 7th fell on a Thursday. See the published edition of the correspondence, cited below, for additional information.
Place of writing taken from the postmark.
This collection, MA 1848, is comprised of 92 letters from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Robert Southey, written between 1794 and 1819. See the collection-level record for more information (MA 1848.1-92).
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 as MA 1848-1857.
Address panel with postmarks: "Mr Southey / No. 23 / East Street / Red Lion Square / London."
Place of writing taken from the postmark.
This collection, MA 1848, is comprised of 92 letters from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Robert Southey, written between 1794 and 1819. See the collection-level record for more information (MA 1848.1-92).
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 as MA 1848-1857.
Address panel with postmarks: "Mr Southey / No. 23 / East Street / Red Lion Square / London."
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
Beginning "I am sorry, Southey! very sorry that I wrote or publised those Sonnets -- but 'sorry' would be a tame word to express my feelings, if I had written them with the motives which you have attributed to me" (referring to the sonnets satirizing the styles of Charles Lamb, Charles Lloyd and himself that Coleridge had published in the Monthly Magazine under the name Nehemiah Higginbottom); defending himself: "I have not been in the habit of treating our separation with levity -- nor ever since the first moment thought of it without deep emotion"; saying that Southey is wrong to assume that one of the sonnets ("written to ridicule infantine simplicity, vulgar colloquialisms, and lady-like Friendships") is a satire of his poetry; writing that he is particularly sorry to "perceive a disposition in you to believe evil of me, and a disposition to teach others to believe Evil -- of which your remark to Charles Lloyd was a painful instance"; writing "I say this to you; because I shall say it to no other being" and adding "I feel myself wounded"; saying that he forgot to mention in his letter to Lloyd the name of the editor of the Morning Post, Daniel Stuart, and that Stuart is the brother-in-law of James Mackintosh.
Catalog link
Department