Coleridge: Darker Reflections. Richard Holmes

edit and publish it single-handedly from Grasmere seemed almost crazily so. Most of his friends, with the signal exception of his old Fleet Street editor Daniel Stuart, thought it could never succeed. Charles Lamb voiced the general view when he wrote wryly to Hazlitt in December: “There came this morning a printed Prospectus from S. T. Coleridge, Grasmere, of a Weekly Paper to be called The Friend. A flaming Prospectus, I have no time to give the heads of it. To commence first Saturday in January [1809]. There came also Notice of a Turkey from Mr Clarkson, which I am more sanguine in expecting the accomplishment of than I am of Coleridge’s prophesy.”²⁴

      Wordsworth, Southey and Tom Poole were all secretly of the same opinion. Coleridge’s disorganization, his unbusinesslike routine, his legendary prevarication over deadlines, his philosophical introspection, and above all his ill-health and opium addiction would surely destroy any chance of journalistic success. Only a man as optimistically naive as John Morgan could possibly write: “I think this plan of yours most admirably calculated for your habits of thinking…with a trifling effort you must succeed.”²⁵

      Moreover Coleridge was not planning a conventional paper, with topical or polemical appeal. He distinguished his aims sharply from the regular pro-government papers, the fashionable radicalism of the newly-launched Examiner, the brilliant literary partisanship of the Edinburgh Review, or the racy political populism of William Cobbett’s Weekly Register (his nearest rival as a one-man operation, but of “undigested passionate Monologues”).

      Coleridge intended to eschew all current affairs, literary novelties, personalities or political scandals. Indeed he rejected the very idea of journalistic appeal and popularity itself, even though Jeffrey and Cobbett had discovered a huge new readership for such material in an angry and discontented wartime England, disillusioned with its leadership and restless with economic deprivations. Coleridge wanted to challenge and provoke in a far deeper, more thoughtful way, and his readership would be deliberately restricted.

      “My Purposes are widely different,” he wrote to Humphry Davy. “I do not write in this Work for the Multitude; but for those who by Rank, or Fortune, or official Situation, or Talents or Habits of Reflection, are to influence the Multitude. I write to found true PRINCIPLES, to oppose false PRINCIPLES, in Criticism, Legislation, Philosophy, Morals, and International Law.”²⁶

      These great “principles” were supposed to emerge as the work unfolded: there was no declaration of an initial ideology or campaign motto. But Coleridge wanted to write as an opinion-former, to create a philosophical intelligentsia in a new way. His work was to be deliberately elitist: exclusive and intellectually demanding. He made no apology for this. He was not producing a set of “Labourers’ pocket knifes” for cutting bread and cheese, but a “Case of Lancets” for dissecting the anatomy of a national condition.²⁷ His target was what he came to call the “Heresy” of expediency, of short-term aims, superficial thinking; it was also the intellectual partisanship of British journalism itself.

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      There were various versions of his Prospectus, the first two printed at Kendal, and a third in London. They were circulated also as commercial advertisements by friends and booksellers in Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, Bath, York and Leeds, with the initial intention of securing one thousand subscribers.

      This relatively high circulation target was crucial to the financial viability of the project. Yet the tone of the Prospectus was far from commercial. It deliberately called attention to Coleridge’s working habits, his reputation for “unrealized schemes”, his vast and eccentric reading, and most significantly of all, the existence of his private Notebooks. This decision to make the paper a personal testament from the outset, with strong elements of intellectual autobiography, was the key to Coleridge’s journalistic approach. Like the whole venture, it was a high-risk strategy, and the one that most alarmed his friends. But in the Prospectus he committed himself from the start, with all the perilous promises of self-exposure.

      At different Periods of my Life I have not only planned, but collected Material for many Works on various and important Subjects: so many indeed, that the Number of unrealized Schemes, and the Mass of my miscellaneous fragments, have often furnished my friends with a Subject of Raillery, and sometimes Regret and Reproof…I am inclined to believe, that this Want of Perseverance has been produced by Overactivity of Thought, modified by a Constitutional Indolence…I was still tempted onward by an increasing Sense of the Imperfection of my knowledge, and by the Conviction, that, in order to fully comprehend and develop any one Subject, it was necessary that I should make myself Master of some other, which again as regularly involved a third, and so on, with an ever-widening Horizon. Yet one Habit, formed during long Absences from those, with whom I converse with full Sympathy, has been of Advantage to me – that of daily noting down, in my Memorandum or Common-place Books, both Incidents and Observations; whatever had occurred to me from without, and all the Flux and Reflux of my Mind within itself. The Number of these Notices, and their Tendency, miscellaneous as they were, to one common End (what we are and what we are born to become) first encouraged me to undertake the Weekly Essay…²⁸

      This declaration was followed by a fabulous list of possible essay subjects. They ranged from the elevated and philosophical – “Ground of Morality as distinguished from Prudence”, or “Origins of the Moral Impulses”; through the cultural aspects of Politics, Poetry, Painting, Gardening, Music, Foreign Literatures, Education and Travel; to the chatty “Characters met with in real Life”. All these did eventually appear at some point in The Friend.