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British Library, Add MS 47890. Previously published: Lynda Pratt, ‘“Of All Men the Most Undomesticated”: Coleridge’s Marriage in 1802: An Unpublished Letter by Robert Southey’, Notes and Queries, n.s. 49 (March 2002), 16-17.
These letters were edited with the assistance of Carol Bolton, Tim Fulford and Ian Packer
For permission to publish the text of MSS in their possession, the editor wishes to thank the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; the Bodleian Library Oxford University; the British Library; Boston Public Library; the Syndics of Cambridge University Library; the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge; Haverford College, Connecticut; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Hornby Library, Liverpool Libraries and Information Services; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the John Rylands Library, Manchester; the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas; Luton Museum (Bedfordshire County Council); Massachusetts Historical Society; McGill University Library; the National Library of Scotland; the Newberry Library, Chicago; the New York Public Library (Pforzheimer Collections); the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; the Public Record Offices of Bedford, Suffolk (Bury St Edmunds) and Northumberland, the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne; the Trustees of the William Salt Library, Stafford, the Wisbech and Fenland Museum; the University of Virginia Library.
A research grant from the British Academy made much of the archival work possible, as did support from the English Department of Nottingham Trent University.
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I should not so immediately have answered
your letter but for what you have heard of Coleridges seperation.
Something I saw myself. Edith saw a
great deal. in no one instance was Mrs Coleridge ever to blame. sometimes he
has succeeded in provoking her by saying how Dorothy
Wordsworth & Mary
Hutchinson would have acted towards him – by
eternally & falsely praising them. & he has
repeatedly before me failed. I never saw two tempers so
altered.
He complains that she irritates him &
makes him so ill that he can do nothing. this is a wretched
excuse for idleness. ill he assuredly is & that illness
has perhaps so changed his temper. he is in debt to the
booksellers – to Johnson.rs Coleridge never knows whether he
means it or not – . she now knows not
that his conversation with Davy, Tobin &c
is about his wifes ill temper – in order that it may reach
Wedgwood
I shall write to him to say that as for
seperating that will be a good thing certainly for both. but
that he is very foolish & very criminal in making his
domestic disputes the talk of all his acquaintance – men
whose system it is to xxx
disallow all matrimonial connections. On this subject if he
will make it so publick I cannot be silent, because I know
from what I have seen & heard that the fault is his. she
did told him once in
Ediths
hearing that he had been a bad son, a bad brother, a bad
friend, & a bad husband. it stung him – because it was
true.
In the first years of their marriage she often put him out of temper by urging him to write. this was natural enough but very unwise, & she at last left it off as useless & only productive of dissention. the fact is no wife could suit Coleridge – he is of all human beings the most undomesticated.
____
Do you write to my Uncle. it will be better than my writing as you can state more clearly the situation of his things. this has been a very troublesome business to you & I am heartily sorry for it.
My poor
Mother was buried yesterday. Carlisle
accompanied me to the funeral. Edith continues
very poorly
Do not let me be so long again without hearing of you. –
our love to Mrs Danvers – God bless
her! – except Edith there is no woman left whom I love so
well or should most miss
so much.