The Publication of Coleridge’s “Prometheus” Essay

In March 1824 Coleridge was elected one of the ten Associates of the First Class of the Royal Society of Literature, each of whom was to receive from the Privy Purse one hundred guineas a year.  The new Royal Associates were under only one obligation: to communicate to the Society at least one paper a year in a field of study of his own choice.  Coleridge did not meet his obligation in the first year, 1824-5; but neither did five of the other Royal Associates.  The year he did give his one paper, 1825-6, was a bumper year: seven Associates complied.  But there was a falling off after that: five in 1826-7, four in 1827-8, none in 1828-9, four in 1829-30; and after the Royal Bounty was withdrawn at the death of George IV in June 1830, only one Associate –James Millingen – continued to communicate year after year; even Sir William Ouseley flagged, and Sharon Turner, who had started very strongly indeed even before he was elected, fell silent.  By February 1835 four of the original ten Associates had died – Coleridge, Malthus, Roscoe, Davies: and no more were ever elected.

On Wednesday 18 May 1825, Coleridge read to the Society his one paper: “On the Prometheus of Æschylus; an essay, preparatory to a series of Disquisitions respecting the Egyptian in connection with the Sacerdotal Theology, and in contrast with the Mysteries of ancient Greece.”  The next day he told his nephew Edward Coleridge that he had “had to inflict an hour and twenty-five minutes’ essay full of Greek and superannuated Metaphysics on the ears of the Royal Society of Literature”, and that he had felt “remorseful pity for my audience all the time.  For, at the very best, it was a thing to be read, not to read” (Letters, ed. E. H. Coleridge, 2 vols, 1895, II, 739-40).  Judging from the interests of his fellow Associates and other members of the Society at that time, and the papers they read on antiquarian, Egyptological, epigraphic, and philological matters, Coleridge’s “remorseful pity” for his audience may have been misplaced; but he may also have expected some lack of sympathy for, he said, “my researches with the light of English Common Sense have rendered me a sturdy anti-Egyptian and a very sceptical Hindustanist” (Unpublished Letters, ed. E. L. Griggs, 2 vols, 1932, II, 349).  The essay was not published in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature until 1834; the same text survives in one copy of a separate pamphlet now in the British Museum (Ashley 2868), acquired by Thomas J. Wise from Mrs. H. G. Watson née Gillman.

Thomas J. Wise was very much concerned to establish the priority of certain “prepublication” books or parts of books, and was prepared sometimes – as we now know – to go to strenuous and unorthodox extremes in establishing the bibliographical credentials of such items.  That his powers of self-persuasion were sometimes stronger than the force of the typographical evidence before his eyes is illustrated by his treatment of this obscure copy of Coleridge’s essay.  In his Bibliography of the Writings of S. T. Coleridge (1913), Wise marks the pamphlet as “The First Edition” and adds the following note to his formal description:

Coleridge’s paper On the Prometheus of Æschylus was read before the Royal Society of   Literature on May 18th, 1825, and was duly published in Vol. ii, Part ii, of the Society’s Transactions, 1834, pp 384-404.  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.

In his Catalogue of the Ashley Library, I 211 (1922) and in his Two Lake Poets (1927), the note is repeated, but leaving out the reference to the Transactions and adding: “In addition to the present copy I know of only one other survivor.” The descriptive note, with its authoritative declaration of circumstantial “evidence”, has for more than fifty years persuaded those who cared to consult Wise’s bibliographies that there was a “private” issue of the Prometheus essay and that it was circulated in 1825, before 18 May.  Yet the separate issue of the Prometheus essay is actually an offprint from the Transactions of 1834; it was not the custom of the Royal Society of Literature then or at any time to print papers in advance of their reading; Coleridge’s essay was not “duly published” in the Transactions, unless that phrase can embrace publication after a request for revision nine years later; and the size of the “private edition” if that is an acceptable phrase for a batch of gratuitous offprints – was a guess, though as it turns out a pretty close one.

When the Prometheus pamphlet is put beside Vol II Part ii of the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, it is seen to be clearly an offprint, though a few small changes in the arrangement of the type give the offprint the appearance of an independent publication without title-page.  The essay was numbered XXI in the series that runs through both parts of Vol II of the Transactions and opens on a verso page.  The number XXI has been removed from the first line of the title and the line respaced to full measure to accommodate the change.  Below the title of the essay (which has been raised into the generous head-drop) a notice is inserted which Wise refrains from including in his description: “[Extracted from Vol. II. Part II. of the ‘Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature.’]”; and below this, the line “Read May 18, 1825” has been retained from the Transactions.  The rest of the type remains unaltered, except for the pagination and signatures: the paging has been changed from 384-404 to [1] 2-20; the signatures 3D and 3E, together with the associated words “VOL. II. PART II.”, have been removed and new signatures B, C, D inserted at pp [1], 9, 17.  The offprint, like the Transactions II ii and the collective titlepage and contents for Vol II, is imprinted: LONDON: J. MOYES, CASTLE STREET, LEICESTER SQUARE.

When the two first volumes (four parts) of Transactions are examined together, other evidence damaging to Wise’s position appears.  Each of the two volumes has a collective titlepage and table of contents; but each part has its own titlepage, the four parts successively dated 1827, 1829, 1832, 1834.  The first three parts of the Transactions, and collective prelims to Vol I, were printed by “A. J. VALPY, M.A., PRINTER TO THE SOCIETY”.  But the contract for Part iv went to J. Moyes (the minutes of the Council of the Royal Society of Literature show that Valpy’s charges, even for Part i, were unexpectedly high), and Valpy – no longer styling himself PRINTER TO THE SOCIETY – was given the Annual Report to print (in place of T. Bretell, Rupert St., Haymarket, who had printed the original Proposals for the Society in 1821  and the Annual Reports from 1824 to 1833).  If the evidence of the imprint were not convincing enough, the area for speculation is further narrowed by the Annual Report for 1832 where the amendment of a Bye-Law provides for exactly those changes which are to be seen in the Coleridge offprint. 

Twenty copies of each separate Memoir contained in the Parts or Volumes of the Transactions of the Society, as they are successively published, shall be specially   prepared, with separate paging and title,[1] for the author of the same; and they shall be supplied to him gratis, on his application in person, or by letter, to the Society’s Collector.

The status and date of publication of the separate issue can then be established by reference to published and easily accessible evidence.  Two further questions may be asked: since Coleridge died on 25 July 1834, what was the exact date of publication of Vol II of the Transactions?  and what became of the manuscript of the essay?  I am grateful to the Royal Society of Literature for allowing me to examine the archives of the Society, from which a few additional matters of fact may be put together.

Preparations for Part iv did not begin to be made until the season 1832-3.  Part iii had been published in March or April 1832 and the Council decided “to select from the Papers which had been read at the ordinary Meetings …, and not yet printed, a sufficient number to complete a second Volume of the Society’s Transactions”.  Thirty-three papers, later reduced to twenty-two, were selected; and delay was incurred through the Council’s anxiety that “in every case where it is practicable, the Authors … should have an opportunity of correcting the proof-sheets”.  But a final selection had been made by November 1833, printers’ estimates were called for on 4 December, and on 7 May 1834 the Council was told that the volume was “now on the eve of publication”.  (At a Council meeting of 11 June 1834 some additional plates were accepted for the volume, but these were issued in a separate fascicule.)  The ledger in which the Secretary recorded distribution of successive parts of the Transactions to members of the Society shows that Part iv was issued to members on 4 July 1834; but the ledger shows entries to Coleridge only for Parts i, ii, and iii – on 17 April 1828, 30 April 1829, and 9 April 1832.  The offprints will presumably have been run off in succession before the formes for each section of the book were distributed.  Coleridge’s essay being placed near the end of the volume will have been printed off late and may not have been completed by the date of publication in early July 1834.  It is quite possible, in view of the ledger entry, that Coleridge did not live to see either Part iv of the Transactions or the offprint of his essay.

The manuscript of the Prometheus essay has never, as far as I know, been described or identified.  A letter to Richard Cattermole, Secretary of the Society, shows that Coleridge submitted “the first specimen” of his projected series of Disquisitions on 26 April 1825.  The reviewing committee reached a decision promptly: the paper was presented on 18 May as the second to be presented in that season.  After the lecture the manuscript will have been given to the Secretary, for it was a rule of the Society that “All papers read … shall be preserved in the original, numbered, catalogued, and arranged in portfolios, or volumes: and the writers of Papers read … shall, if they so require, be allowed to take copies thereof”.  The minutes of Council in November 1833 refer to “the collection [of papers] in the Secretary’s custody”, and there is still in the archives of the Society an incomplete series of numbered papers, some of considerable length and most of them showing formidable minuteness of scholarly exposition.  Since Coleridge was the only genuinely “literary” man among the Associates, and his manuscript was in the Secretary’s possession, it might be expected that his essay would have been published promptly.  But there are signs of deliberate postponement.  Volume I Part i is made up largely of papers given in 1825, but a regular sequence running from January to May stops at the meeting immediately before the date of Coleridge’s paper.  Part ii carried the series forward and includes no paper earlier than February 1826; Part iii was planned for the prompt publication of three large related specialist papers (with three smaller ones added at the last moment).  Part iv was in a sense a cleaning-up operation to complete the second volume of Transactions; and Coleridge’s paper appears in the list of contents proposed to the Council by the publications committee.  One reason at least why the paper had been so long delayed may be implied by a Council minute of 18 December 1833 when final arrangements for Part iv were being made: “The Secretary was directed to refer Mr. Coleridge’s Memoir on the Prometheus of Eschylus to the Writer, with a view to its being arranged for publication in a condensed form.”  By that time Coleridge was in failing health and probably unable to attempt the revision himself (though records for the Table Talk were made by H. N. Coleridge to within a few days of his death on 25 July 1834).  Somebody – Henry Nelson Coleridge or Joseph Henry Green – made a much abbreviated summary report, couched in the third person: it was first printed in Notes and Lectures on Shakespeare, ed. Sara Coleridge (1849), II, 218-22 (reprinted in Complete Works, ed. W. G. T. Shedd (1853), IV, 366-8).  Whoever made the summary had misunderstood the secretary’s requirement and produced a version so inharmonious with other essays in the Transactions that it could not have been acceptable for inclusion.  No correspondence on the subject survives.  What seems to have happened is that, in view of Coleridge’s poor health and the committee’s desire for early publication, the committee decided to use the original manuscript and afterwards placed it on file according to the rules of the Society.  In order to see whether the Transactions version was substantially shorter than the paper delivered in 1825, I read the whole essay aloud at a deliberate pace and found that it took just short of 70 minutes to read.  It might well have taken Coleridge 85 minutes to read, if we allow for the formality of the occasion, the density of the text, and perhaps some digression and impromptu elaboration.  It would appear then that the Transactions version is much the same length as the essay as delivered by Coleridge to the Society.

But there may also have been a set of corrigenda.  Among the manuscript essays in the archives of the Society, there is a file-folder inscribed – I think in Richard Cattermole’s hand –

XVII  Read 18 May 1825  |  Author S T Coleridge  |  classed–  |  Deferred Additions & corrections on the Prometheus of Eschylus, an Essay preparatory to a series of disquisitions respecting the Egyptian in connexion with the sacerdotal theology and in contrast with the mysteries of ancient Greece –

After the summary had been rejected, Coleridge may have sent revisions in the form of a set of corrigenda and additions; and the file record could reflect such a thing.  But the file itself is watermarked 1844, and the numbered series of manuscript essays was evidently a retrospective reconstruction, based perhaps on earlier files but made when some manuscripts were already missing (Coleridge’s paper, here numbered XVII, was in fact the twentieth paper to be delivered to the Society).  The folder now contains a sheaf of 14 leaves of closely written notes which are not in Coleridge’s, HNC’s, or Green’s hand and bear no relation to the Prometheus essay beyond the accident of there being a reference to the Prometheus in the first note.  The incorrect identification of these notes could account for the notation made on the file in 1844 or a little later, though the first part of the inscription seems to have been taken from the original file.  The evidence for Coleridge having provided “Additions & corrections” is far from conclusive.

I can find no trace or record of the manuscript used as copy for the Transactions.  But a first draft of what became the body of the Prometheus essay is in the Duke University Library: a transcript by J. H. Green of an essay written by Coleridge in 1820-21 for his son Hartley – 25 pages, with corrections and alterations in Coleridge’s hand on pp [3]-[8], [10]-[19] of the text.  This “proto - Prometheus” manuscript breaks off in mid-sentence, the completion of two pages being in Notebook 29 (new York Public Library): the 13 leaves of the manuscript is inscribed (? by Sara Coleridge) “the Author, S. T. Coleridge.”, and in Coleridge’s hand: “M^r John Anster  |  30 Thornhaugh St  |  Bedford Square.”  It is not clear whether Anster’s address was a notebook memorandum not connected with the draft essay, or whether it implies that the essay was presented to Anster; if presented to Anster, it is difficult to see why the last leaf was left in the notebook.

The original manuscript of the essay, deposited with the Society in May 1825, sent back to Coleridge at the end of 1833 for revision, and presumably returned to the Society early in 1834, must have disappeared from its file by about 1844 when the new file-folder was made up; and the two letters from Coleridge to Cattermole regarding the Prometheus lecture were already in private hands by the time E. H. Coleridge transcribed them for inclusion in his 1895 edition of the Letters.  There is no reason why the Prometheus manuscript should ever have gone by right to the Coleridge family collection: that is the only external – if negative – clue to where it may have gone.  It may still turn up.  At least the early history of the manuscript can be traced with some certainty; and the printed copy of the essay in the Ashley collection can now be accurately described as an offprint from the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, Vol. II, Pt. ii, pp 384-404, issued “[1834, c 4 July]”.