Portrait of a Bibliophile: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772-1834

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was neither a manic book collector like Southey nor a dainty and omnivorous collector like Francis Wrangham.  Books were his life, his means of communicating with the spirits of the past and the present, his means often of communicating with himself and with his world.  When he was alone in Malta in 1805 he observed in a Notebook: ‘Books are conversation at present.  Evil as well as Good in this, I well know / but Good too as well as Evil /’ (CN 2526).  He was interested first in what was written in a book; condition meant nothing; his instinct was not acquisitive, ‘I love warm Rooms,’ he told his wife in 1802, ‘comfortable fires, & food, books, natural scenery, music &c; but I do not care what binding the Books have, whether they are dusty or clean – & I dislike ... all the ordinary symbols & appendages of artificial superiority – or what is called, Gentility.’  (CL II 881.)  Reading Baxter’s Reliquiae Baxterianae in 1820 he noticed these words:

And the use that God made of books, above ministers, to the benefit of my soul made me somewhat excessively in love with good books; so that I thought I had never enough, but scraped up as great a treasure of them as I could...It made the world seem to me a carcase that had neither life nor loveliness; and it destroyed those ambitious desires after literate fame which were the sin of my childhood.

Against the passage Coleridge wrote: ‘What a picture of myself!’

So Coleridge’s library was that of an affectionate and myriad-minded scholar.  As a poet his interests were broad and demanded nourishment from many sources.  ‘Sadly do I need to have my Imagination enriched with appropriate Images for shapes ...,’ he noted in October 1803.  ‘Read Architecture, & Ichthyology ...’ (CN 1616).  Add to this his interests as philosopher, theologian, psychologist, his intermittent but not unimpressive talent for scientific observation, his literary and critical interests concentrated much (as Lamb’s were) upon 17th-century writing; and there is no way of predicting what one may find in his library.  But he never had much money to spend on his books.  The largest single outlay he ever made on books at one time was the £30 spent on German books when he was in Hamburg and Göttingen in 1798 and 1799: and £5 out of the £30 had been spent before he left England.  To a great extent he was at the mercy of what came his way through good fortune, the generosity of others, and the delicate balance (never easy for any bibliophile) between what he actually needed and what he could in fact pay for.  He bought some theological folios ‘for their weight’ in the ‘Book-Golgotha’ of a druggist in Exeter; he rescued a large group of Caroline and Civil War tracts from Westmorland shops where they were being used as ‘winding-sheets for pilchards’ after the dissolution of a gentleman’s library at Broughton.  Lamb bought him books from barrows in the Barbican ­– sometimes spontaneously, sometimes on request – a pastime in which Lamb was untiring but Coleridge never sedulous.  People gave him books, sometimes with a perceptive regard for the sort of books he liked to read: Lamb as an elaborate tribute to his friend’s erudition sent him four large folios of Thomas Aquinas to read in bed when he was ill in Highgate; Edward Irving gave him his one incunable, Hugo de St Victor, De Sacramentis Christianae Fidei (Strassburg, 1485), with initial capitals neatly executed by hand in red and blue.  He was fond of his copy of the Byfield and Brerewood sabbatarian controversy (now in the Morgan Library) because it had been accidentally put up in a parchment wrapper ‘which I conjecture to be part of a Record, that had belonged to Canterbury Cathedral, of the Pilgrims, Offerings, miraculous Cures &c at the Shrine of Thomas of Becket ...’  Mr West, a surgeon of Calne, gave it to him; and he thought to transcribe to MS from the wrapper, if he could, and send it to the Gentleman’s Magazine (CL IV 594), but in the end didn’t.  Sotheby’s huge tetraglott Georgies (1827) Coleridge cherished enough – as a book and for Sotheby’s friendship – to give to his daughter on her wedding day.  He was not above suggesting to John Murray a translation of Faust for the sake of getting from the publisher a set of the latest edition of Goethe.  He knew how rare Giordano Bruno’s books are, cherished the two volumes he acquired, watched the fate of an exceptional group of Bruno books in the Roxburghe Sale, and was hurt and indignant when the purchaser of the books – a Mr Hare – refused to lend then, and so prevented Coleridge (he said) from completing his History of Giordano Bruno (CL IV 926).

Sometimes he could buy what he needed; occasionally by one means and another he could secure what he wanted.  As time went on, he became more and more devoted to old and neglected books, feeling that one of his major tasks was to discover and reintroduce into the living tradition books impressive for their daring thought, their finely modulated style, their incorrigible vitality.  As far as the physical evidences of age enhanced his sense of the past living in the present, he had no objection to dust, crumbling calf, spiders’ webs, traces of bookworms.  But he had too great respect for any book to open its leaves with a buttery knife as Wordsworth is scandalously (and perhaps unjustly) alleged to have done; and he had little patience with the technique of accelerated ageing that Lamb practised by allowing cheese-crumbs, port, and tobacco-ash to fall into the gutters of his books.  Coleridge’s primary devotion was to the text; and once his habit of writing marginal notes was firmly established he would look narrowly at the quality of the paper to see whether it would take ink well.  Despite his attachment to the philosophy and literature of Germany, his complaints against the paper in his German books were continuous, often vituperative, sometimes indelicate.

Coleridge himself appreciated that whatever value his library might have, it lay in the contents and balance of the collection and not in the intrinsic value, condition, or rarity of single works or copies in his possession.  ‘In case of my speedy death,’ he noted in 1808, ‘it would answer to buy a £100 worth of carefully-chosen books, in order to attract attention to my library and to give accession to the value of books by their co-existing and co-appurtenants – as, for instance, Plato, Aristotle; Porphyry, Proclus; Schoolmen, Interscholastic; Bacon, Hobbes; Locke, Berkley; Leibnitz, Spinoza; Kant and the critical Fichte, and Wissenschaftslehre, Schelling, &c.’ (Anima Poetae, p. 183).  In those bad days – when he told Lamb that he might die at any moment – he might well consider the potential value of his library to his estate.  A little later, in September 1813, when he needed money to help his friends the Morgans, he told Daniel Stuart that he was ‘compelled to sell my Library’ (CL III 442).  Perhaps he could find no buyer, or necessity may have been less stern than at first he imagined; but he came to see that his books were not an easily realizable asset, for two months later he asked Charlotte Brent to undertake the ‘very, very awkward Business’ of recovering from pawn ‘40 Books, Watch, Snuffbox, in for 6£ ...’ (CL III 455).  When Coleridge made his will in September 1829, his provision against the immediate dispersal of his library and manuscripts shows that their value to his legatees depended not upon intrinsic worth but upon the fact that they had been Coleridge’s: that the MSS were written by him, that many of the printed books contained MS notes written by him in their margins.  Joseph Henry Green, ‘the dear friend, the companion, partner, and helpmate of my worthiest studies’, was named as executor and was bequeathed ‘all my books, manuscripts, and personal estates and effects whatsoever ... upon trust, to sell and dispose thereof ... according to his discretion’.  But Green was also given the option of buying the books at his own price ‘inasmuch as their chief value will be dependent on his possession on them’.  Green exercised that option in 1835 when he inherited his father’s estate.  Not until the sale of Green’s library in 1880 (after the death of his widow) did the dispersal of Coleridge’s library begin on any scale.  Also from the Green sale of 1880 came the group of Coleridge’s marked books which provided the foundation for the British Museum’s unparalleled collection of Coleridgeana.

The marginalia written in his books Coleridge regarded as an integral part of that harvest of writing ‘the main portion of [which] is still on the ground, ripe indeed, and only waiting, a few for the sickle, but a large part only for sheaving and carting, and housing’.  After Mary Lamb’s death in 1848, Lamb’s executor Edward Moxon destroyed by fire most of Lamb’s ‘ragged regiment’ and sold the small residue – ‘these were worth nothing,’ Moxon told Talfourd – to ‘some American’ for £10.  Coleridge’s library might well have suffered a similar fate but for the affectionate regard his family, editors, and friends had for his literary remains: Green honouring the terms of Coleridge’s will, others following Coleridge’s wishes as he must have expressed them before his death.  A month after Coleridge’s death, Green had a clear editorial plan.  Henry Nelson Coleridge was to edit ‘the literary & critical portion of the poet’s remains’; Gillman was to collect the letters (but didn’t); Julius Hate and Stirling were to take in hand ‘the theological part’ (but in fact made no headway with it); Green reserved for himself ‘the delivery of the philosophical monster’ which H.N.C. admitted might prove ‘a Caesarean operation’.  The marginalia (or some of them) received prompt treatment.  H.N.C.’s edition of the Literary Remains, 4 vol., 1836-9, consisted largely (especially vols. III and IV) of marginalia.  After H.N.C.’s death Derwent Coleridge issued two more sets of marginalia in 1853 under the titles of Notes on English Divines (2 vol.) and Notes Theological, Political, and Miscellaneous; some of these marginalia were reprinted from Literary Remains but a good proportion were hitherto unpublished.

A watercolour drawing in the possession of Mr Walter Coleridge (reproduced in Letters, ed. E. H. Coleridge, II 616) shows Coleridge’ study in James Gillman’s house, No. 3 The Grove, Highgate, where he lived from December 1823 until his death in 1834.  One side of the room is filled floor to ceiling (except for the bottom range of cupboards which is closed) with some 500 to 600 volumes.  The collection here shown represents pretty clearly Coleridge’s working library during the last few years of his life.  If this were the whole of his library there would perhaps have been little difficulty in determining its contents and tracing the individual books.  But throughout his life Coleridge had dispersed books as well as accumulating them.

When Coleridge moved into Greta Hall, Keswick, early in 1800, he wrote to some of his friends inviting them to come and work in his library where he had collected what he regarded as an impressive group of old and standards works.  His assessment is exaggerated, though pardonable.  To his small but good collection of 17th-century prose he now added the case of German books sent from Hamburg, recovered at last from some unknown hazard of travelling; but he had also left behind in London and Bristol books, some of which Lamb returned or Poole preserved, but not all of which were ever recovered.  From 1804 to 1806 Coleridge was in the Mediterranean and acquired there certain Italian and other books that remained in his library till his death.  But some of his books (with other papers) were lost on the return voyage; and when he arrived at Greta Hall he found (though not to his surprise for he himself had no intention of staying) that Southey was now established there, books, family and all.  Southey’s library – larger already than Coleridge’s, more splendid and constantly growing – superseded Coleridge’s on the best shelves until Southey’s angelic folios had driven Coleridge’s books out into the smaller rooms and into the corridors where the children moved at their peril in a bibliophilic half-light.

Some time round about 1808-10 Mrs Coleridge and her daughter Sara seem to have sorted out and marked Coleridge’s books to distinguish them from Southey’s.  For two years he worked at The Friend, writing it, supervising its printing, seeing to all details of publishing and circulation, with his headquarters with the Wordsworths at Allanbank, Grasmere.  From there in September 1808 he had told his wife to ‘send me [from Greta Hall] a good lot of books by each Carrier – no odds, with what you begin – as many each time as you conveniently can – & lastly the Shelves’.  (CL III 121.)  When the Wordsworths lived in Dove Cottage they had always kept a room for Coleridge; he had been in the habit of leaving behind books and papers that he might want to use there.  Now most of his working books were set up in a study of his own in Allanbank, a room where, of all the rooms in that smoke-ridden house, the chimney smoked a little less than elsewhere.  Only once thereafter did Coleridge use his study at Greta Hall: in the summer of 1810, when he was bemused and undecided, and – as his wife shrewdly observed – ‘he has not appeared to be employed in composition, although he has repeatedly assured me he was’.

When The Friend had died in 1810, Coleridge left for London, quarrelled with the Wordsworths and never visited them again in Grasmere.  During the dark years of London, Bristol, and Calne, Coleridge had no settled place to live: he was in lodgings, sometimes with the Morgans at various addresses, sometimes in Bristol with various friends; and surviving letters show that in his wanderings in these years he left behind a small trail of his own books and books borrowed from other people.  In May 1812 the Wordsworths sent him, at Mrs Coleridge’s request, ‘three Boxes of ... German Books, & ... a parcel by coach’ – books needed by Coleridge for his lectures and ultimately also used in the composition of Biographia Literaria (WL III 494-5).  In April 1816 he took up residence with the Gillmans in Highgate, first at Moreton House.  then in December 1823 the Gillmans moved to No. 3 The Grove.  A letter by Coleridge to his wife in February 1824 shortly after the move, shows that a considerable group of his books was still at Greta Hall.  But there were also many with the Wordsworths.  The books gathered at Allanbank in 1808 and left there in 1810 had moved with the Wordsworths – except for the three boxes of German books sent in 1812 – to Rydal Mount.  The only picture of Wordsworth’s library in Rydal Mount I have seen suggests extreme decorum and acute tidiness.  But a MS inventory of Wordsworth’s library first drawn up in 1823 and revised again in about 1829 suggests that Coleridge’s books were indiscriminately mixed with Wordsworth’s.  The inventory also contains a short list in Wordsworth’s hand of book-titles ending: ‘The above sent to Coleridge.’  These books seem to have been sent to Highgate in 1832-33 probably at Coleridge’s request; and others were sent to Highgate or Helston or both soon after Coleridge’s death.  A certain number remained at Rydal Mount, a few being sold with Wordsworth’s library but most dispersed through the Wordsworth family.

At the time of Coleridge’s death on 25 July 1834 the bulk of his working library was at The Grove, Highgate.  There were unspecified books left behind at Greta Hall with Mrs Coleridge and the Southey household; there were others at Rydal Mount with the Wordsworths; Coleridge had given or lent books, and a certain number had drifted into the possession of Hartley and Derwent, the sons, as well as the daughter Sara and her husband-cousin, Henry Nelson Coleridge, the first editor of Coleridge.  In addition there were books with various friends in Bristol – the Wades, Morgans, Thomas Poole (whose library has never been traced).  Acknowledgements in Literary Remains also show that Coleridge had left behind annotated books that had never belonged to him – some of this annotating having been done on request – in the possession of Charles Lamb, J. H. Frere, H. F. Cary, Southey, Wordsworth, Joseph Henry Green, the Gillmans, Henry Crabb Robinson, Charles Aders, C. A. Tulk – to mention only the most obvious ones – and even the Stowey Book Society and a now vanished Westminster Library had gratuitous evidence of his marginalist propensity.

The books in Coleridge’s immediate possession at the time of his death were in the Gillmans’ house; some of the philosophical books, particularly the German ones, may have been with Green.  In 1835 Green exercised his option of buying all the Coleridge books, and by amicable agreement recovered them from the Gillmans making a temporary division between himself and H.N.C. for editorial purposes.  It must have been at this time that the Gillmans, parting with annotated books for which they must have felt peculiar affection, made or caused to be made the MS facsimiles – in no sense forgeries – which have from time to time confused buyers and sellers.  (When Thomas J. Wise later bought a group of association volumes from the Gillman family his possessive desire for the unique beguiled him into describing two of these careful transcripts as genuine Coleridge autographs.)  James Gillman’s senescent Life of Coleridge was issued in 1838.  Gillman died in 1842.  With the sale of his library at auction by Southgate in April 1843 the public dispersal of Coleridge’s books begins.

In tracing and identifying Coleridge’s books, I have found it convenient to use the term ‘marked book’ to refer to any book that bears Coleridge’s MS notes, his signature or note of ownership or acquisition, a presentation inscription by him or to him, or a reliable mark or note of provenance ascribing the book to Coleridge’s library.  A number of Coleridge’s books have disappeared and are known only from description in catalogues; few of these books can without qualification be placed in the category of ‘annotated’ or ‘presentation copy’ or with ‘autograph signature’; compilers of auction catalogues and family inventories are no less prone to bibliographical error than anybody else.  At least all the ‘marked books’ must have passed through Coleridge’s hands – even the marked books that did not belong to him; and the books he annotated must have been read at least in part.  But even among the books now available for examination a division between annotated and unannotated is not always for literary or biographical purposes a useful or significant distinction: for many of the books that were most important to him he did not annotate, and some of the books he did annotate are trivial even from a biographical point of view.

In the process of dispersal there are a few landmarks apart from the sale catalogues.  The Wordsworth Library Catalogue (consisting of short titles, often ambiguous or confused, usually providing too little evidence in itself to establish an edition or at times even a correct title) was drawn up in 1823, revised in 1829, and the list of Coleridge books was written by Wordsworth in about 1832.  This shows 317 titles of books belonging to Coleridge: there were probably others not identified.  Of these, 115 titles were sent to Highgate in 1832-33; it is not clear how many of the remaining 200 went to Highgate or Helston in 1835.  There is another library list – drawn up by Mrs J. H. Green almost certainly after her husband’s death and some time before the Green Sale in 1880.  The list comprises 237 titles, ten of which appear twice in the list.  Mrs Green’s eyesight was failing; she had no knowledge of German or Latin; consequently many of the entries (all are much abbreviated) are a sad jumble.  Of the books in this list, ten were included in the Green Sale; thirty-five escaped altogether from the Green-Coleridge collections; about 180 went into Derwent Coleridge’s collection and so ultimately into one or other of the big permanents Coleridge collections.

In 1867 and 1870 C. M. Ingleby, in a series of splenetic attacks upon the editorial indolence of Coleridge’s literary executors, drew attention in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature to some ten of Coleridge’s annotated books.  This is the first of a continuous trickle (in Notes and Queries, learned quarterlies, and elsewhere) of notices and transcripts of Coleridge marked books: descriptions that in some cases provide the only exact (sometimes not very exact) knowledge we have of some of the books.  The first attempt to give an account of the annotated books was by J. Anderson in an appendix to Hall Caine’s Life of Coleridge (1887) in the form of a list of sixty-one titles of marked books then in the British Museum, mostly from the Green Sale of 1880.  In 1907 John Louis Haney included in his Bibliography of Coleridge a list of 341 marked books, including thirty-six marked copies of Coleridge’s own works.  Haney’s list was drawn largely from the evidence of printed marginalia and from entries in a few sale catalogues; but it included some titles in Lord Coleridge’s collection at Ottery St Mary, the details of which collection were not to be known to Coleridge scholars for another thirty years.  Haney’s list of marked books can now be increased about threefold; the list of marked copies of Coleridge’s own works about sixfold.  It is now possible to say with some degree of confidence what books Coleridge owned; some accurate lists of his borrowings have been recovered; nearly half of the known marked books have been located.  The titles, and often the editions, of missing marked books are now to a great extent known; and one can say with some certainty along what lines of provenance these books have reached their present locations or have disappeared.

As executor and friend of the family, Joseph Henry Green gave some marked books to Henry Nelson and Sara Coleridge, to Hartley and Derwent, to the Gillmans, and perhaps also to H.N.C.’s son Herbert.  These gifts, though generous, were never large.  When Gillman died in 1842, and H.N.C. in the following year, only two libraries contained any large number of Coleridge’s marked books.  The intention of Coleridge’s will was clearly that Green should hold the books and MSS in trust for the time being, and that these should revert to the family when Green had finished his work.  Green’s work on the Coleridge philosophy was not published until 1865, after Green’s death; but Green bequeathed his library, including the Coleridge materials, to his wife: and his wife, dying in 1879, bequeathed all the Coleridge materials to Derwent, Coleridge’s only surviving child.  Derwent was then seventy-nine years old; his advanced age and some ambiguous details in Mrs Green’s will may account for his failure to extricate from the estate all his father’s books and papers.  But Derwent’s collection was indeed impressive, for despite some erosion in the course of time it has divided into the two largest Coleridge collections there are.

About the Gillman and Green sales there is however the one puzzling question: why did either of them include as many marked books as they did?  It the Gillman Sale (1843) there were at least thirty-one marked books sold; in the Green Sale (1880) at least 160; there was no duplication between the sales.  From these two sources most of the Coleridge books outside the family have come.  Yet of the 191 titles sold in those two sales, only seventy-six are now known to exist.  The pattern and scale of dispersal of these books is shown in Table I.

Of 245 titles of marked books sold 1832-91, 110 are now known to exist.  If the British Museum holdings are taken away only fifty-one titles would now survive.  If this rate of attrition had applied to all Coleridge’s books, the balance of survival would be sadly disturbed.  One of the few survivors from the Green sale (other than those in the BM) is a copy of Rehberg’s Verhältniss der Metaphysik zu der Religion (Berlin, 1789).  It was bought by Stibbs and shortly afterwards (1884) was offered for sale by Scribner’s.  Bernard Flexner ‘picked [it] out of a box of books on sale’ in New York and gave it to the British Museum in 1934.  Yet it bears on the fly-leaf the names of Sara Hutchinson and S. T. Coleridge in his hand, and on the inside lower cover a note signed and dated ‘August 29th, Syracuse, 1804’.  Fortunately the one large family collection inherited by Derwent Coleridge was carefully preserved.  It was amplified a little by accretions from family sources and diminished a little every time the collection was moved or changed hands; yet it has remained virtually intact through three generations and in two branches of the Coleridge family.

Derwent Coleridge died in 1883 bequeathing to his son Ernest Hartley, not only S. T. C.’s marked books and a quantity of manuscripts and letters, but also Derwent’s own very considerable library.  The sale of Derwent’s philological library in 1888 included only one Coleridge marked books (now in the British Museum); but another portion of his library sold in 1891 included sixteen marked books only two of which found their way back into the family.  In 1862, at the sale of Herbert Coleridge’s library, fifteen marked books were offered for sale; Derwent bought four of these.  E. H. Coleridge gathered together what few books and MSS came his way in sales or bookshops – particularly from Iredale – but his acquisitions were on no great scale.  As editor of his grandfather’s letters and poems, and prospective author of a life and editor of the notebooks, E.H.C. now had in his possession a collection of printed and manuscript material more extensive than will ever again be brought together in one place.  The continuity of E.H.C.’s own editorial work and the excellent biographical and editorial work of his friend James Dykes Campbell are tributes to that collection.  But in 1891, discouraged in his editorial work and in need of funds, E.H.C. arranged to sell to Lord Chief Justice Coleridge, grandson of S.T.C.’s eldest brother James, a large group of Coleridge’s marked books, most of the Notebooks, and a considerable group of other manuscripts.  This ‘Ottery Collection’ was bequeathed in turn to Bernard Lord Coleridge, 2nd Baron, and in 1951 was purchased by the Coleridge Trust and deposited in the British Museum.  E.H.C., dying in 1920, bequeathed his remaining collection to his elder son, the Revd Gerard H. B. Coleridge; this collection was later called by Coleridgeans the ‘Leatherhead Collection’.  In 1945 when G.H.B.C. retired and moved to a smaller house, some of his books inadvertently came on the market (not least, the annotated Wordsworth Poetical Works now in the Royal Library in Windsor); but the main part of it remained in his possession to be bequeathed jointly in his three sons Alwyne, Anthony, and Nicholas, and in 1954 was acquired for Victoria College, Toronto.

In this way the family collection, reinforced by a large acquisition from the Green Sale of 1880, has passed into two large public collections: the British Museum and Victoria College, Toronto, Canada.  The Victoria Collection comprises 120 marked books.  The British Museum already held eighty-one marked books, the largest public Coleridge collection in the world, before the Ashley Library added another twelve; to this total of ninety-three the Ottery Collection added 123 titles making a total of 216 marked books.  These two collections account for 336 titles, not including marked copies of Coleridge’s own works.

Compared with this, I find the total of only 116 titles in other public collections: thirty-two in the United Kingdom, eighty-four in the United States (see Table 2).  It is interesting to remark that of the thirty-two in the United Kingdom only fourteen are known to have come through the sales already listed; and of the eighty-four in the United States forty-one have come through the focal sales shown in Table 1.  A total of sixty-one, rather more than half, have found their way into these public collections along different, and usually casual or accidental, lines of provenance.[5]  It is clear from all the evidence that many marked books have disappeared; sometimes wholesale vanishings after public auction, sometimes in the gradual process of attrition in which books are given away one by one, or borrowed and not returned, or destroyed from not being recognized for what they are: one or two are known to have been destroyed during the second World War.  On the one hand it is encouraging to find that various libraries in UK and US hold together almost a third as many books as the British Museum and Victoria College combined.  But the known rate of losses from the public sales alone is much more sobering.

Although only something of the order of 450 marked books have now actually been located, it has been possible to reconstruct the titles, usually editions, and often quite minute details of missing books and to trace some details of provenance.  It is to be hoped that as time passes some of these will come to the surface and be recognized for what they are.  Some have certainly been destroyed; others may have been destroyed through accident or neglect.  But there must still be a good number to be recovered if a buyer or collector knows what to look for.

APPENDIX

NOTE ON IDENTIFICATION OF COLERIDGE’S MARKED BOOKS

Since there are a good many marked books not located, and since some of these are known to be heavily annotated though no exact transcript of the notes has ever been made; and since there is no saying when or where any of these will turn up, a word or two about Coleridge’s ways of marking and annotating books may help to identify them.  Contrary to the impression inadvertently given by Lowes in The Road to Xanadu, Coleridge did not annotate books in his earliest years.  Early marginalia are terse ejaculations of the sort any vigorous and opinionated reader might make.  The earliest extensive marginal comments were written in 1802, for Sara Hutchinson, for Lamb, and in one or two instances a little later for Southey.  The habit of extensive annotation as a mode of self-communing, of breaking solitude by direct communication with the author of a book, begins in the Malta period 1804-06, encouraged partly by his loneliness at that time and partly by the stable conditions under which he could write.  But he had relatively few books with him at that time; and in the disturbed wandering years 1807-15 after his return to England, the annotations are – for lack of books, because of ill-health and unstable living conditions – intermittent and seldom copious, unless (as in the case of the Bristol Joan of Arc) carried forward with virtuosity at special request or on the force of some commanding critical impulse.  The greatest number of extensive annotations belong to the Highgate period.  Here he worked steadily in a well-known and familiar study; he had many of his books around him; his life was tranquil and methodical, broken only by calls from visitors and an occasional holiday at Ramsgate.  In this period the notebook entries also become most profuse and continuous, with daily entries progressively on related subjects – sometimes entries at intervals of only a few hours.  At Highgate too he annotated a number of books on request.  But for a number of reasons the extent of annotation is not always a sure sign of the importance of a book to Coleridge, even though he seldom wrote extensive notes in a book he did not admire or find worthwhile.  A number of the books that are known to have been of major importance to him bear few or no notes.  And since the identification of his edition of a work is often important, considerable effort has been spent in tracing these books too – the ones that, because not annotated, have tended to be disregarded or lost.

The unannotated marked books raise a special difficulty.  Coleridge did not always – or even often – except in the early years write his name in his books, though there are many that bear his signature on flyleaf or title-page.  His normal signature is ‘S. T. Coleridge’ and is sometimes (though by no means often) followed by a date and occasionally by a note on the place and circumstances of acquisition.  Coleridge’s hand is distinctive and for the practised eye easy to identify.  I do not know of any cases of his writing being forged, though unfortunately it has often been wrongly identified.  Cataloguers have often described books as containing the autograph signature or initials of Coleridge; but in any particular case this statement should be accepted with reserve.  There are a number of books bearing the signature ‘S. T. Coleridge’ not in his hand; and there are a few instances of J. T. Coleridge’s signature being mistaken for S. T. Coleridge’s partly because J.T.C. seems consciously to have patterned his signature upon that of his illustrious uncle.  I know of no instance of Coleridge signing a book ‘S.T.C.’ despite his fondness of that appellation for himself.  I feel confident, and despite the fact that he sometimes initialled marginalia in that style, in stating as a general rule that all books bearing on flyleaf or title-page the initials ‘S.T.C.’ are books so marked by the Wordsworths, by Southey or the two Saras, even by the Gillmans or the Greens to distinguish Coleridge books in their possession from their own books.  This can be proven in a number of cases; and that Mrs and Sara Coleridge picked out and marked Coleridge’s books to avoid confusion with Southey’s is shown by a number inscribed in Mrs Coleridge’s distinctively careful and immature hand: ‘S. T. Coleridge | Gretahall | Keswick’ – an inscription not infrequently mistaken for Coleridge’s autograph.  Coleridge sometimes signed or initialled his marginal notes in the Highgate years; this usually, though not invariably, shows that he is writing notes on request, or (very rarely) that he is writing notes in a book already annotated.  But in view of the number of manuscript facsimiles (about twenty-five at a rough estimate), usually written in copies of the same edition as the original and with as exact faithfulness as the penman could command – even to the transcription of Greek by scribes who knew none – the initials ‘S.T.C.’ or the signature ‘S. T. Coleridge’ does no more at first than establish authorship of the note; in a MS facsimile the initials or signature may have been transcribed from the original or they may have been added by the scribe to identify and establish the authority of the notes.  Also there are a certain number of ghosts, both in catalogues and in collections – books containing notes allegedly in Coleridge’s hand which are neither in his hand nor of his composition.  Only the evidence of handwriting and knowledge of what Coleridge could have read and written can settle such a question.