Coleridge’s Sheet of Sonnets, 1796

Sir, – Early in November, 1796, Coleridge told Poole: “I amused myself the other day … in selecting 28 Sonnets, to bind up with Bowles’s.”  He printed 200 – “as my paper held out to no more” – and disposed of them privately for sixpence a copy.  (Collected Letters I, 252).  The sheet had no title and comprised 16 pages: the first two devoted to an essay on the sonnet, the remaining 14 carrying the sonnets two to a page.  Professor Griggs notices in his edition of the letters that only two copies have survived: one in the Victoria and Albert – the copy given to Thelwall by Coleridge and bound with Mrs. Thelwall’s copy of Bowles’s Sonnets, 1976; the other in the Huntington Library, bound with Lloyd’s copy of Bowles’s Sonnets, 1794 – four of Lloyd’s sonnets being included in the sheet.  A third copy has now come to light in Dove Cottage: Coleridge’s own copy, unsewn and partly unopened.  He has corrected one of Lloyd’s sonnets, and to his own sonnet, “To the River Otter” has made alterations which did not find their way into print until Sibylline Leaves (1817).  Coleridge gave this copy to Sara Hutchinson with the inscription: “The Editor to Asahara, the Moorish Maid, Dec. 1800, Greta Hall, Keswick.”  In my Coleridge and Sara Hutchinson I light-heartedly followed the Dove Cottage catalogue in describing this as “proof-sheets of Anna Seward’s Original Sonnets (1799).”  Coleridge, as an undergraduate was, we know, enthusiastic about Anna Seward, and Southey had some correspondence with her; but there is no sign that Coleridge ever fell into editorial or any other relationship with the Swan or Lichfield, beyond including one of her sonnets – piratically, one imagines – in this little anthology.

That two of the three known copies of this bibliographical rarity should be bound with Bowles’s Sonnets is no accident.  For even if Coleridge’s statement in his letter were ignored – and it has been in print since 1895 at least – the opening sentence of the prefatory essay is conclusive: “I have selected the following SONNETS from various Authors for the purpose of binding them up with the Sonnets of the Rev. W. L. BOWLES.”  This important detail, though unobtrusively noticed by J. D. Campbell in his edition of the Poetical Works, 1893, is omitted from E. H. Coleridge’s reprint of the essay in Poetical Works II, 1139, and is not noticed in Wise’s description of the pamphlet in his Bibliography of Coleridge, 1913.  Even Sir Edmund Chambers, who seldom left any stony fact unturned, merely repeats the substance of the letter of November 1796.

There may well be other copies of the Sheet of Sonnets in existence.  The place one can expect to find it is bound with copies of Bowles’s Sonnets in octavo from 1794 onwards.