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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
James Gillman's Life of Coleridge may be called the first and the official biography. Allsop's and Cottle's volumes, which preceded it, were fragmentary and miscellaneous; and although Gillman's death in 1839 left the work incomplete, bringing the story of Coleridge down only to about 1817, it was not superseded for fifty years. It was necessarily a main source for Traill, Brandl, and Caine, who wrote their accounts in the 1880's; for Leslie Stephen in his sketch for the D.N.B., written in 1887; and for Campbell in his “Biographical Introduction,” of 1893, which still remains the fullest and best treatment. Gillman's Life is now little read, but it has had important influence on our conception of Coleridge. It is therefore worth while to consider what Gillman did—and what he did not do.
page 412 note 1 James Gillman, The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London, 1838), l, vii.
page 412 note 2 As far as I can discover, Coleridge's only direct reference to Walton's Lives is his use of passages from the “Hooker” in his Notes on the English Divines (London, 1853); this section of the book is dated 1820–30 by its editor, Derwent Coleridge. But so great a lover of the seventeenth century as Coleridge must early have come to know all the Lives either in their seventeenth-century editions or in that of Zouch, published in 1796. There is also an advertisement in the back of Gillman's Coleridge, of The Works of the Rev. George Berbert, published in two volumes by William Pickering, the Poems “with notes by S. T Coleridge“; the Remains ”with his Life by Izaak Walton.“ Though this work is described in 1838 as a second edition, Haney lists only an edition of The Temple ”with notes by Coleridge,“ published in 1857; John Louis Haney, A Bibliography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, (Philadelphia, 1903), p. 41. The new bibliography, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a selected bibliography … compiled by Virginia Wadlow Kennedy and Mary Neill Barton (Baltimore, 1935), does not mention any such edition of Herbert. I have not seen the volume advertised by Pickering.
Wordsworth's sonnet to “Walton's Book of Lives” (Ecclesiastical Sonnets iii, v) is a well-known tribute to “meek Walton's heavenly memory.” Written in 1822, it bears witness to old acquaintance and affection. I do not know any reference to the Lives in Lamb, but he recommended The Compleat Angler twice to Coleridge (June, 1796, and October 28, 1796) and once to Lloyd (February 7,1801); see Lamb's Letters, ed. E. V. Lucas (London, 1905), pp. 20, 52, 212. There is also a letter from Dorothy Wordsworth to the Beaumonts, dated 1808, thanking them for their recent gift of a copy of the Angler; see Memorials of Coleorton, Ed. William Knight (Edinburgh, 1887), ii, 37.
The praise of Walton's Lives in an article on “The Modern Poets” in Fraser's Magazine (October, 1834), x, 428, is incidental evidence that the biographies were familiar to a fair share of the literary public.
page 412 note 3 The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Professor W. G. T. Shedd (New York, 1853), vi, 469.
page 412 note 4 Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1887), i, 427.
page 412 note 5 From the letter of March, 1800, and that of December 14, 1802, both written to Poole.
See James Dykes Campbell's “Biographical Introduction,” The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London, 1893), pp. li, lix.
page 412 note 6 Soon after he went to Highgate, Coleridge wrote to Stuart and invited him for dinner. “You will like Mr. Gillman,” he said. “He is a man of strong, fervid, and agile intellect, with such a master passion for truth, that his most abstracted verities assume a character of veracity.” The Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. H. Coleridge, (London, 1895), ii, 665. Eight letters to the Gillmans (in the same edition) and numerous references show that this enthusiasm for Gillman, and for his wife as well, was no temporary whim. See also The Unpublished Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 2 vols. (New Haven, 1933).
page 412 note 7 In one passage of his Reminiscences (vol. 1834—43) Crabb Robinson denies this. “During this year [1816] Coleridge was residing with Gil[l]man at Highgate who had generously taken him under his charge. I used now and then to go and see him at Gil[l]man's but I went seldom for I thought the Gil[l]mans treated me with rudeness and this happened to Lamb also. Blake, Coleridge, Lamb, etc., being selections from the Remains of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Edith J. Morley (Manchester, 1932), p. 69. Yet under date of June 24,1817, Robinson recorded a visit thus: ”Mr. Gillman joined our party, and the forenoon till four was spent very agreeably indeed. We chatted miscellaneously.“ The Diaries of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Thomas Sadler (Boston, 1869), i, 364. Lamb wrote seven very pleasant letters to the Gillman family between 1821 and 1834, all suggesting intimate friendship; see Lucas's edition, already cited.) Charles Leslie, the American artist, wrote in 1816 of the Gillmans, ”They are the sort of people that you become intimate with at once. They have invited me in the most friendly manner to visit them at all times, and to spend weeks with them“ Autobiographical Recollections, ed. Tom Taylor (1860), ii, 50. Quoted by Alexander Gillman, The Gillmans of Highgate (London, 1895), p. 2.
page 412 note 8 For recent evaluations of Walton's aims and methods see Donald A. Stauffer, English Biography Before 1700 (Harvard U. Press, 1930), pp. 91–120; Mark Longaker, English Biography in the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1931), pp. 27–32; and John Butt, “Izaak Walton's Methods in Biography,” Essays and Studies of the English Association, xix (1933), pp. 67–84.—The latter is a particularly interesting demonstration that within the limits of his aim, Walton was a careful and honest workman.
page 412 note 9 Gillman, op. cit., pp. 251–256. Hare's article appeared in 1835 in the British Magazine, vii, 15–27.
page 412 note 10 Ibid., p. 3.
page 412 note 11 Ibid., p. 11.
page 412 note 12 Ibid., p. 23.
page 412 note 13 Ibid., p. 65.
page 412 note 14 Ibid.
page 412 note 15 Ibid., pp. 86–96.
page 412 note 16 Ibid., p. 115.
page 412 note 17 Ibid., p. 157.
page 412 note 18 Ibid., pp. 205–240.
page 412 note 19 Ibid., pp. 156–163, 314–323.
page 412 note 20 Ibid., pp. 338–354.
page 412 note 21 Ibid., pp. 359–362.
page 412 note 22 Coleridge's father before him was a man “of the most simple habits.” (p. 2.) As a preacher and schoolmaster he manifested “simplicity and honesty of purpose.” (p. 8.) When the day-dreaming young Coleridge touched a man's pocket in the Strand, the gentleman was “struck and delighted … with the simplicity and intelligence of the boy.” (p. 17.) It was Coleridge's “simplicity of character” that caused him to record numerous trivial details concerning his boyhood. (p. 29.) The “childlike simplicity which he had from a boy” Coleridge took with him to college, and he retained it “even to his latest hours.” (p. 41.) His “simplicity” led him into debt. (p. 42.) “The simplicity of Coleridge's manners … made him an object of curiosity, and gave rise to the relation of many whimsical stories about him.” (p. 170.) As a general comment on the nature of Coleridge, Gillman adapts a saying about Gay to apply thus: “In wit, a giant; in simplicity, a very child.” (p. 313.)
page 412 note 23 Ibid., p. 253.
page 412 note 24 Ibid., pp. 11, 16, 17, 18, 33, 59, 166, 171, 245–251, 259–261.
page 412 note 25 Ibid., p. 166.
page 412 note 26 Ibid., p. 171.
page 412 note 27 Ibid., pp. 245–246.
page 412 note 28 Ibid., p. 246. Quoted by Campbell, op. cit., p. lvii, from Gillman.
page 412 note 29 Ibid., p. 275.
page 412 note 30 Ibid., p. 245.
page 412 note 31 Ibid., p. 193.
page 412 note 32 Ibid., p. 89n.
page 412 note 33 Ibid., p. 32.
page 412 note 34 Ibid., p. 312.
page 412 note 35 Ibid., p. 83.
page 412 note 36 Ibid., pp. 172–173.
page 412 note 37 Izaak Walton, The Lives (Boston, 1860), p. 237.—This edition is an American reprint of an English edition of 1845, based on the earlier one of Major.
page 412 note 38 Gillman, op. cit., pp. 108–113 (Hazlitt); 240–244 (De Quincey); 12–16,36–37 (Lamb); and 50 (Gentleman's Magazine).
page 412 note 39 Ibid., p. 108.
page 412 note 40 Ibid., pp. 57, 117–118.
page 412 note 41 Ibid., p. 36.
page 412 note 42 Ibid., p. 303.
page 412 note 43 Ibid., pp. 276–307.
page 412 note 44 Ibid., pp. 103–106.
page 412 note 45 Ibid., pp. 96–100, Preface to Poems, 1796; pp. 71–73, Preface to Condones ad Populum; pp. 148–152, Preface to Wallenstein; p. 267, Preface to Remorse; pp. 281–283, Preface to Christabel.
page 412 note 46 Ibid., p. 75.
page 412 note 47 Ibid., pp. 40–41, 155, 182–190.
page 412 note 48 Ibid., pp. 195–207, 208–223.
page 412 note 49 Ibid., p. 262.
page 412 note 50 Ibid., pp. 329–335.
page 412 note 51 Ibid., pp. 263–265.
page 412 note 52 pp. 9–11, 17, 20, 23, 25–26, 28, 165, 167–170, 175–178, 223–224,246–251,312, 319–322, 359–362.
page 412 note 53 The earliest letter of Coleridge to be given is that written to Lamb, September 28, 1796, on receiving news of the tragic death of Lamb's mother. This letter Gillman introduces near the end of the volume, as “characteristic of the man”; it is described as being written “to a friend,” and is dated only as “thirty years before his [Coleridge's] decease.” (Gillman, pp. 338–340). The next letter, in chronological order, is the long one to Cottle, mentioned above. It is dated “Bristol, 1807,” and is wholly concerned with religious doctrine. (Gillman, pp. 225–240. Cottle had already printed this letter in his Early Recollections, London, 1837, pp. 83–99. The texts show only the most incidental variants of punctuation, and a note of Cottle's at the end is taken over by Gillman.) A passage regarding Byron is quoted from a letter “to a friend, written April 10th, 1816.” (Gillman, pp. 266–267.) Coleridge's letter to Gillman after their first meeting is given in full. (Gillman, pp. 273–276.) Letters written to Allsop on January 28, 1818, and September 20, 1818, appear, but Allsop's name is not given. (Gillman, pp. 345–348. These are the first two letters in Allsop's Letters etc., and are given by Gillman without change.) More important is the letter to a Mr. Britton, refusing to lecture at the Russell Institution on any set subject. (Dated February 28,1819; Gillman, pp. 351–354.) A letter to Gillman himself, written from Ramsgate, October 28,1822, is full of kind sympathy; but the nature of Gillman's difficulty is not clear, and his name is not given. (Gillman, pp. 344–345; see Coleridge's Letters, 1895, ii, 721–722.) Two other letters are given without date or the name of the correspondent. One is the fragment which discusses “A Hymn Before Sunrise in the Valley of Chamouni.” (Gillman, pp. 308–310; recently reprinted by Griggs, Unpublished Letters, ii, 261–263, and conjecturally dated 1820. The correspondent is still unknown.) The other letter, to someone Coleridge met at Bristol, I have not thus far been able to identify; it may, as Gillman says, express Coleridge's “religious, grateful, and affectionate feelings,” but it is otherwise unimportant. (Gillman, pp. 341–344.) From this survey it is clear that Coleridge's correspondence contributed very little to Gillman's biography.
page 412 note 54 Recently published correspondence has made more clear the negotiations between Cottle, Poole, H. N. Coleridge, and Gillman. See Warren E. Gibbs, “Unpublished Letters Concerning Cottle's Coleridge,” PMLA, xlix (1934), 208–228.
page 412 note 55 Gillman, op. cit., p. 122.
page 412 note 56 Ibid., p. 113n.
page 412 note 57 Ibid., pp. 46–49.
page 412 note 58 Ibid., pp. 143–145.
page 412 note 59 Ibid., pp. 146–147.
page 412 note 60 Ibid., pp. 335–336, 354–357.
page 412 note 61 Ibid., pp. 257–259, 272.
page 412 note 62 Ibid., p. 272.
page 412 note 63 Ibid., pp. 354–357.
page 412 note 64 Ibid., pp. 12–16.
page 412 note 65 Ibid., pp. 76–83.
page 412 note 66 Ibid., pp. 240–244 (De Quincey); 108–113 (Hazlitt).
page 412 note 67 In the recently published Letters of Hartley Coleridge, ed. Grace Evelyn Griggs and Earl Leslie Griggs (London, 1936), p. 230, appears Hartley's judgment of Gillman's Life: “It is a good hearted, noble minded book, but it is not a well-written or well constructed book.”