Coleridge and the Royal Society of Literature

The proposal for a Royal Society of Literature was made informally to King George IV by Bishop Burgess in 1821.  The King approved of the idea and offered to support the Society with a substantial gift from the Privy Purse.  The King’s munificent offer was announced and widely applauded: 1,100 guineas a year, for annual grants to ten Royal Associates and an annual prize for an essay.  The King actually intended no more than an outright gift of 1,000 guineas and an annual sum of 100 guineas.  The public interest in the announcement was so widespread and the applause of the royal generosity so fervent that the King agreed not to rectify the Bishop’s mistake.  In May 1822 a provisional council was formed to prepare a constitution and regulations; these were submitted to the King and endorsed by him on 2 June 1823.  The first meeting of the Society was called a few days later to appoint the Council of the Society, and the Council first met on 21 June 1823; the first Ordinary Meeting was held on 5 November of the same year. 

The first Annual Meeting was called on 16 May 1824, the main item of business being the matter that had engaged the energies of Council for almost a year – the appointment of ‘Ten Associates of the First Class on the Royal Foundation.’  Three Royal Associates had been elected by the Council on 5 July 1823, and at a meeting on 12 February 1824 a short list of four Honorary Associates – one of them being S. T. Coleridge – was prepared from which a fourth Royal Associate was to be chosen.  Coleridge already knew that Basil Montagu had recommended his name for consideration and that he was prosecuting his cause vigorously.  But he was offended when he was advised by Montagu, as he told Joseph Henry Green immediately after the February meeting, ‘to write to such and such & such’ and so to carry out ‘a regular Canvas’.  He had ‘jibbed’, he said, and told Montagu that ‘what a man’s friends did sub rosa, and what one friend might say to another in favor of an individual, was one thing – what a man did in his own name & person, was another – and that I would not, could not, solicit a single vote’.  Green could if he liked drop a line to Chantrey, however.  And there was one shaft of sunlight:  ‘One of the Electors’ names is Cattermole!!!  I wonder what twi-bestialism that Fellow committed in his pre-existent state to bring down such a name upon him!’  There is no reason to suppose that the process of selection was any less impartial than it ever is in the conduct of human affairs: at their meeting on 11 March 1824 the Council chose Coleridge’s name from the list of four, and Coleridge received the news a few days later in a letter signed by the Secretary of the Society, the Reverend Richard Cattermole.  At the first Annual Meeting, on 1 May 1824, Coleridge – wearing a new suit for the occasion – was formally admitted Royal Associate with four others: T. R. Malthus, Sir William Ouseley, the Reverend H. J. Todd, and Sharon Turner.  (Only six Royal Associates had so far been elected, and one was absent through illness.)  Coleridge’s undertaking to the Society is written out in full in his own hand and signed; and a draft of his brief statement of his area of interest to be explored for the Society also survives. 

A Royal Associate was under only one obligation: to communicate to the Society at least one paper a year in a field of study of his own choice.  The annual grant of 100 guineas was an important matter to Coleridge: it would bring him some relief from the financial anxiety that had dogged him for years.  Yet before he was elected he had considered withdrawing his name because he had much work in hand – in the press, nearing completion, and in draft – which would have to be neglected if he were to meet his annual obligation; he even said that he would have withdrawn his name if he had not thought that this would embarrass his sponsors.  Almost a year had passed since his election when in April 1825 he wrote to the Secretary to explain why he had not submitted a paper before, throwing himself ‘upon the indulgence of the Society’,  and  asking them to ‘regard the Year past as a period employed in the liquidation of a debt previously incurred’.  But he was now ready, he said, to meet his obligation for the current year, 1825, and enclosed his paper for the consideration of the committee.  The selection committee acted promptly, and the paper was scheduled for almost immediate delivery.

Since Coleridge is sometimes said to be a man of unfulfilled obligations, it may be noted in passing that he was not the only Royal Associate who had trouble with the annual paper.  In the first year (1824-5), five others reneged; 1825-6 – the year of Coleridge’s paper – was a good year with seven Associates complying.  But after that there was a sad falling off: in 1826-7 only five spoke, in 1827-8 four, in 1828-9 none, in 1829-30 four; and after the Royal Bounty was withdrawn in 1831 only one of the Royal Associates – James Millingen – continued to communicate year after year.

On 18 May 1825 – a Wednesday – at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, Samuel Taylor Coleridge delivered at an Ordinary Meeting the one paper he was ever to read to the Society: ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus: An Essay, Preparatory to a series of disquisitions respecting the Egyptian in connection with the Sacredotal Theology, and in contrast with the Mysteries of ancient Greece.’  The Right Reverend the President (Thomas Burgess, Bishop of St. David’s) was in the chair; the Secretary was present and – beyond whatever other members of the Society may have been there – a few loyal friends: Basil Montagu (Coleridge’s original sponsor), Joseph Henry Green (physiologist, Coleridge’s philosophical collaborator, and later his literary executor), and Edward Irving (the spellbinding preacher); James Gillman, Coleridge’s host in Highgate since 1816, intended to be there and probably was.  Coleridge’s nephew, John Taylor Coleridge, was invited but did not make it, otherwise we might not have Coleridge’s own account of the lecture:

I had to inflict an hour and 25 minutes’ Essay, full of Greek and superannuated Metaphysics, on the ears of the Royal Society of Literature – … ‘Deuce take me’ (as Charles Lamb says in his ‘Superannuated Man’) if I did not feel remorseful Pity for my Audience all the time.  For at the very best it was a Thing to be read not to read.

The minutes of the meeting simply record the title of the paper and the fact that Coleridge delivered it.

Coleridge did not continue with the ‘series of disquisitions’, though he seems to have sent a written apology and explanation most years and was friendly enough with the Secretary for Richard Cattermole to pay him at least one visit in Highgate.  There is no sign that Coleridge consorted much, if at all, with the members of the Society, but the minutes of the Ordinary Meeting for 2 March 1831 show that he presented to the library a copy of the second edition of Aids to Reflection (1831) and a copy of On the Constitution of Church and State (1830).  Both these, and a copy of the Poetical Works, 3 volumes, 1829, appear in the library list, but only the Poetical Works is still in the library.  The fact that the Poetical Works, without autograph inscription or signature, is still in the library suggests that the other two books were inscribed by Coleridge and may have been expropriated for their association value.

The essay ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’ was published by the Society but it was not exactly rushed into print.  The first three parts of the Transactions were published in 1827, 1829, and 1832, but with no sign of Coleridge’s essay.  During the house-cleaning in preparation for the fourth part – vol. II, pt. ii – of the Transactions, the manuscript of the essay being (according to the Rules of the Society) in the Secretary’s possession, the Secretary was directed on 18 December 1833 ‘to refer Mr. Coleridge’s Memoir on the Prometheus of Aeschylus to the Writer, with a view of its being arranged for publication in a condensed form’.  By that time, Coleridge was ill and his strength failing.  A condensed report of the paper, prepared one imagines by Henry Nelson Coleridge, was sent to the Society but evidently was not publishable.  (The text of this condensed report has, however, been preserved.)  The editorial committee decided to print the complete manuscript in their possession, as can be seen by comparing the printed version with the manuscript draft from which Coleridge had worked in 1825.  (The manuscript itself disappeared from the Society’s archives many years ago, as did the correspondence between Coleridge and Cattermole.)  Thomas J. Wise in three successive bibliographies described a separate issue of the essay, then in his possession, and now in the British Museum library: ‘This Private Edition was printed and circulated in the customary manner, in advance of the reading of the Essay.  Issued (in an Edition of Twenty-five copies only) stitched, and without wrappers.’  This prenatal issue is sheer bibliographical fantasy.  What Wise is describing is an offprint from the Transactions, vol. II, pt. ii of 1834 with the typographical modifications specified in the Rules of the Society: the author was entitled to twenty copies gratis.  The publication ledgers of the Society show that copies of the Transactions, vol. II, pt. ii were sent to members on 4 July 1834, but that Coleridge was not sent one.  His twenty offprints were certainly prepared: one copy is now in the British Museum (originally Wise’s copy), another was reported by Wise (apparently in the possession of the Gillman family), and a third was bound in a composite volume in Joseph Henry Green’s library.  But it is not certain that they reached Highgate in time for Coleridge to see them before he died on 25 July 1834.

King George IV died on 25 June 1830, but since payment to the Royal Associates was made ‘on the day of the anniversary of the Society’, it was not until Coleridge’s grant failed to arrive in May 1831 that he realized that King William had declined to continue the Royal Bounty.  Coleridge protested, and so did a few other Royal Associates.  Friends protested too, both in high places and in the newspapers.  Some of the public correspondence singled out Coleridge as a prime example of poverty-stricken genius suffering under royal injustice, and James Gillman had to intervene with a letter to The Times to relieve Coleridge of this embarrassing notoriety.  But King William IV was not to be moved by compassionate pleading: he simply said that he did not have the money.  Lord Grey, at the insistence of Lord Brougham, offered Coleridge £200 from Treasury funds to be paid in two annual instalments, but Coleridge declined this offer with dignity: he and the other nine had been appointed Royal Associates, as they understood for life, and a Treasury grant would be a different affair offered in a different spirit.  In the end the Government invented a suitably delicate means of providing a grant for the surviving Royal Associates, but only two lived to receive their grants, and it was too late to benefit Coleridge.  He could not pretend that the loss was not serious, and said shortly before his death: “I have not been worth a shilling of my own in the world since King William IV took my poor gold chain of a hundred links – one hundred pounds – with those of nine other literary veterans, to emblazon d’or the black bar across the Royal arms of the Fitzclarences.’  For the Royal Society of Literature and its officers, however, he cannot have felt anything but respect and gratitude.