Preface

Summary

Several years ago, confronted by problems in the history of chemistry, I sought an interview with Kathleen Coburn, to ask for help in unraveling Humphry Davy's possible indebtedness to Coleridge. Miss Coburn's response was to introduce me to Coleridge's remaining unpublished notebooks, some of them replete with chemical and other scientific entries. She cheerfully invited me to make sense of them. The notes proved, for the most part, individually incomprehensible, forming part of an intellectual enterprise that was then unfamiliar to me. This book has grown from my attempts to overcome that unfamiliarity; and so I take pleasure in reminding Kathleen Coburn that she provided my incentive.

Miss Coburn and Merton Christensen, coeditors of the forthcoming volumes of The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, have been generous with criticism, encouragement, information, transcripts, and time. Miss Coburn has also been of great assistance in persuading me of the value of a blue pencil in revising drafts of my manuscript.

Several editors of individual works in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (general editor Kathleen Coburn) have been equally generous. Heather Jackson told me of several manuscripts of which I was ignorant; she allowed me to read drafts of her edition of the Essay on Scrofula and the Theory of Life for the Shorter Works and Fragments; and she read and criticized a complete draft of this book.