Coleridge, Southey and ‘Joan of Arc’

Although Southey’s name appears alone on the title-page of the first edition of Joan of Arc, it has long been known that Coleridge made some substantial contribution to the early books of that poem.  Since his early association with Southey marks an important turning-point in Coleridge’s poetic development, it is of some interest to trace the history of composition of the whole poem.  This is made possible by a group of Southey’s early letters preserved in the Bodleian Library, the manuscript of Joan in the British Museum, and the record of his borrowings from the Bristol Library Society.

Southey and Coleridge met for the first time in Oxford just before the middle of June 1794.  Southey’s reading of Hartley On Man between 8 July and 22 August (Borrowings 21, 22)[1]  marks the immediate impact of Coleridge’s conversation and confirms a statement of Joseph Cottle’s.  For Cottle records that Coleridge told him how “particularly amongst the fresh-men at Cambridge...he urged the purchase of three weeks, indispensable to all who wished to excel in sound reasoning, or a correct taste: – Simpson’s [sic] Euclid; Hartley on Man; and Bowles’s Poems.”[2]  In 1792, after his expulsion from Westminster, Southey had engaged in a single-handed but humiliating struggle with Euclid;[3] Bowles’s Fourteen Sonnets, first published in Bath in 1789, may have been known to Southey already;[4] only Hartley remained of Coleridge’s triad.  And Hartley turns up again in a long note of Coleridge’s in Joan of Arc which we shall presently discuss.

Aspheterism, the economic basis of the Pantisocratic community, was a repudiation of personal property.  But even for a voyage to the “port of happiness” passage-money was needed, and the Pantisocrats set to work immediately to make some.  Before Coleridge returned from his summer walking-tour with Hucks through Wales in 1794, Southey dashed off Wat Tyler – “the work, or rather the sport, of a week.”  In two days in August Southey and Coleridge, languidly assisted by Lovell, dispatched the three acts of The Fall of Robespierre in a similar mood.[5]  As soon as Coleridge had left for London and Cambridge with the manuscript of that drama, Southey turned his attention to Joan of Arc, the most promising and saleable part of the 35,000 lines of verse he estimated he had written up to that time.  This project is reflected in his borrowings between 18 September and 3 November (Borrowings 29-34) – especially Clavigero’s History of Mexico and Holinshed’s Chronicles.

Southey had written the first version of Joan during a six weeks’ holiday in Grosvenor Bedford’s home at Brixton Causeway in August and September 1793.[6]  Whether or not the prospectus sent to the Bath printer Crutwell on 19 July 1794 was ever published, an advertisement for Joan of Arc was bound into the volume of Poems by Southey and Lovell published by Crutwell in the autumn of 1794 (the title-page dated 1795).  According to the Preface to the first edition of Joan the revision in the autumn of 1794 was confined to “a very few verbal alterations [which] were all I had made when the paper and types arrived from London, and the Printer was ready to begin.”  The Preface telescopes the process of revision and conceals what, at the time, must have been an irksome delay.  Crutwell can have been in no hurry to print Joan.  And when early in 1795 Cottle made Southey an offer for the manuscript Southey accepted at once.  But the work of rewriting the poem was undertaken rather later in 1795 than the Preface and the first flurry or energy in 1794 would suggest.

On 9 May 1795 Southey wrote to his brother: “My lectures are finished...my Joan of Arc goes to the Press next week”; and explained that the lectures had absorbed his energy from all other work.[7]  His course of Historical Lectures had ended on 24 April.  The reading list shows how quickly he turned to the work of revision: for Fuller (cited in the second edition of Joan as “Fuller of quaint memory”), and the Edda, find their way (with Clavigero’s History of Mexico read 1794) into the notes to Joan.[8]  Southey’s Preface now takes up the story.  “The first proof was brought to me.  I saw its faults, and immediately formed my resolution.  The first 340 lines remain nearly as they were: from thence the plan of the whole has been changed... The rest was composed whilst the printing went on.”[9]  He corrected the last proof sheets on his wedding-day, 14 November; but the serious work of rewriting was finished much earlier.  By 10 August 1795 he was reading d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque Orientale (Borrowing 66) which was to be the starting point of Thalaba in much the same way that Williams’s Farther Observations read in January 1795 (Borrowing 35) was the point of departure for Madoc.[10]  The date of publication of Joan was set for 1 December; the book was complete if not actually issued by early December.[11]  By that time Southey was on his way to Lisbon, and Coleridge was about to launch his plans for The Watchman.

The evidence of the Bristol Library records is that the rewriting of Joan falls between 4 May and about 10 August 1795; and these dates are substantiated by Southey’s letters.[12]  By 22 August Book IV was “advanced in printing”; whether the whole revision was complete by then is not determined.  The manuscript of the first edition (1795: title-page reads 1796), written in Southey’s untiring best hand, shows few signs of its hand-to-mouth revision.  Coleridge’s hand appears only twice in the whole manuscript, both times in notes, his verse contributions having been copied out by Southey.  A long note in Book II, line 34, refutes the “mechanic” philosophy of Newton and Hartley.  The first three paragraphs are copied in Southey’s hand; the fourth is in Coleridge’s.[13]  (The word Adyta in the fourth paragraph scarcely needs the confirmation of handwriting to ascribe the note to Coleridge.)  The first five sentences of the note, except for a few interpolated words, are taken (as Coleridge suggests) verbatim from Hartley On Man, and not as Lowes suggested from Newton’s Opticks.[14]  The other note in Coleridge’s hand is on “a mockery of a Fast” at Book IV, line 489, and refers to Conciones ad Populum (in which the note was printed with minor variants in November 1795).  Both these notes disappeared, with Coleridge’s contributions to the poem, in the second edition of Joan (Bristol, 1798); and the second note is not included in E. H. Coleridge’s variorum version of “The Destiny of Nations.”

Although Southey’s Preface to the first edition gives Coleridge credit only for passages in Book II, intimate collaboration continued to the end of Book IV.  In an annotated copy of Joan Coleridge claimed authorship of five lines in Book IV, and at the end of that Book writes: “All the preceding I gave my best advice in correcting.  From this time Southey and I parted. –”[15]  Very shortly before that parting Southey had written of Coleridge as “Corrector Plenipotent...an office [we] mutually assume.”[16]  Southey’s uncle arrived in England about 20 August, unwittingly to precipitate an open quarrel between Southey and Coleridge.  Southey left the College Street establishment on 1 September.  In the long accusing letter with which he pursued Southey in November, Coleridge writes: “I wrote with vast exertion of all my intellect the parts in the ‘Joan of Arc,’ and I corrected that and other poems with greater interest than I should have felt for my own.”[17]  But when he re-read the poem in 1814 at Hood’s request, he notes at Book II, line 398: “These images imageless – these small capitals constituting personifications I despised even at that time; but was forced to introduce them to preserve the connexion with the machinery of the poem previously adopted by Southey.”[18]  At the same time he wrote to Morgan, how in rereading Joan “I was really astonished, 1. at the school-boy wretched Allegoric Machinery – 2. at the transmogrification of the fanatic Virago into a modern novel-pawing Proselyte of the age of Reason, a Tom Paine in Petticoats, ... 3. at the utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the monotiny [sic] & dead plumb down of the Pauses – & the absence of all Bone, Muscle, & Sinew in the single Lines. –”[19]  These strictures seem however to apply to Southey’s verse; for in Biographia Literaria (I, 16) Coleridge groups Book II of Joan of Arc with his shorter blank verse poems and Remorse as “not more below my present ideal in respect of the general tissue of the style than those of the latest date.”