BIB_ID
416962
Accession number
MA 2204.24
Creator
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834.
Display Date
London, England, 1807 April 30.
Credit line
Purchased from James Richard Scarlett, 8th Baron Abinger, 1962.
Description
1 item (3 pages, with address) ; 24 x 19.3 cm
Notes
Coleridge gives the date of writing on the address panel as "30 April." The year of writing has been taken from the postmark.
Coleridge lists the place of writing as "348, Strand," an address in London. See the published edition of the correspondence, cited below, for additional information.
This collection, MA 2204, is comprised of 41 letters from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to William Godwin, written between 1800 and 1823. See the collection-level record for more information (MA 2204.1-41).
Address panel with postmarks: "Mr Godwin / Polygon / Somers' Town."
Coleridge lists the place of writing as "348, Strand," an address in London. See the published edition of the correspondence, cited below, for additional information.
This collection, MA 2204, is comprised of 41 letters from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to William Godwin, written between 1800 and 1823. See the collection-level record for more information (MA 2204.1-41).
Address panel with postmarks: "Mr Godwin / Polygon / Somers' Town."
Provenance
Purchased, via the London dealer Constance A. Kyrle Fletcher, from James Richard Scarlett, 8th Baron Abinger, in 1962 as a gift of the Fellows.
Summary
Reminding Godwin to look for and return to him a copy of Coleridge's tragedy Osorio, if by chance it has been preserved; explaining "[i]t is not merely, that as a work which employed 8 months of my life from 23 to 24 it is interesting to me in the history of my own mind - tho' I owe it to justice & truth, as well as to myself, to say, that it is but an unfair specimen ; since I was compelled to finish it within a given time, & not to let it exceed 1800 Lines - but a person who loves me more than I deserve, & has been kind to me from an overflow & restlessness of his own goodness which he construes into my merits, as indeed we all do too often mistake the effect of impulse for the influence of motive, has, from certain passages he has heard (not from me, on my honor) expressed an unusual anxiety to possess it;" describing his physical health and his state of mind ("hopelessness without rest, & restlessness without hope"); inviting Godwin to come have breakfast with him; adding in a postcript: "Be so good as to give me a few lines - by return of the Penny - nay - to pay some of the Ex-ministers' Places for Life, I suppose - two-penny Post. - I am joking - it is not Taxes, or Places that frighten or disgust me, for themselves ; but abandonment of principles in the great, producing utter negation of principles in the public. This, this frightens me. -"
Catalog link
Department