Coleridge, Mary (Perdita) Robinson
and “Kubla Khan”
Adam Sisman
(A shortened version
of this article appears as a letter in
the
Times Literary Supplement, 2
December 2004)
[Update: 'C. is
now identified as Thomas Abthorpe Cooper
See Pamela Clemit (TLS - Letters, 18 February 2005)].
In her “Commentary” article, “A Maniac for Perdita” (TLS, 6
August 2004), and in her just-published and generally excellent biography Perdita:
the Life of Mary Robinson, Paula Byrne suggests that her subject may have
had a personal influence on the composition of “Kubla Khan”. It is known that
Coleridge was impressed by Mrs Robinson, the beautiful former actress and
courtesan, whom he described in a letter to Southey as “a woman of undoubted
genius”. She experimented in the writing of opium poems, and they may have
compared their experiences when they met. But hitherto it has been thought that
this was not until after “Kubla Khan” was written. Though it is not certain exactly
when Coleridge composed “Kubla Khan”, it is known to have been in 1797-8, the
period when he was living in the Quantocks. The consensus has been that
Coleridge and Mary Robinson became acquainted while Coleridge was in
Byrne’s new claim is that Robinson and Coleridge met in 1796, before “Kubla Khan” was written. It is founded on two identical entries in William Godwin’s unpublished diaries for the dates 25 February and 4 March 1796, which, she says, read as follows: “Sup at Mrs Robinson’s with Coleridge”. Upon this evidence she advances the following hypothesis: “Mrs Robinson’s supper party may have sown the seed not merely for the narrative of the person from Porlock but for the very idea of turning an opium dream into a poem”. She concludes: “All this suggests that the elusive Mary Robinson, not Samuel Taylor Coleridge, may legitimately be claimed as the originator of the English Romantic tradition of opium-inspired writing.”
If correct, hers would be an important discovery. “Kubla Khan”, as well as being one of the most popular poems in the English language, is one of the most mysterious. It appears to spring out of nowhere. Coleridge had written nothing like it before, and nor, it seems, had anybody else. The story of its composition under the influence of opium, and of its abrupt termination with the arrival of the person from Porlock, adds to the mystery. Some scholars think the story bunkum. So any new evidence that sheds light on the circumstances of its composition is welcome.
The Sunday Times, which serialised Byrne’s book, highlighted her claim in a special boxed feature. Its reviewer praised Byrne’s scholarship, which, she said, “shows to advantage in this last and most impressive stage of Robinson’s mercurial career” (i.e. as a writer): “her influence on Coleridge is thrillingly established.”
But is it? One difficulty is that on 13 May 1796, only a few months after the supposed supper parties with Mrs Robinson and Godwin, Coleridge wrote to his friend John Thelwall, “I was once and only once in company with Godwin”. Dr Byrne explains this difficulty as follows: “the ever-forgetful Coleridge apparently conflates the two supper parties”. There is a further difficulty, which Dr Byrne does not mention, that Coleridge is known to have met Godwin in 1794. But perhaps this could be explained as another failure of Coleridge’s memory.
It is easy to imagine Coleridge’s memory befuddled by opium, but dangerous: the editor of Coleridge’s notebooks, the late Kathleen Coburn, warns readers against this assumption, reporting that in her experience his recall is usually to be relied upon. And given her lifetime’s work on Coleridge, she was in a good position to make such a judgement.
There is yet more difficulty in accepting Byrne’s new
evidence. At the time when he is supposed to have met Mrs Robinson at her home
in London, Coleridge was living in Bristol with his pregnant wife, who he
feared (needlessly, as it turned out) would miscarry. On 13 February 1796 he had returned early
from a tour to collect subscriptions for his new journal The Watchman,
concerned about Mrs Coleridge’s health. Coleridge is known to have written
letters from Bristol on 22 February and on 12 March; it was theoretically
possible for him to have made the trip to London and back in between, but it
seems unlikely that he would have left home at such a time, when he was
preoccupied too with bringing out the first issue of The Watchman, which
was published on 1 March. Byrne suggests that he may have made a lightning trip
to
I read Dr Byrne’s book in proof, and, as I have written elsewhere (Literary Review, November 2004), I think highly of it in general. But I was concerned about her claim that Coleridge and Robinson met in 1796, and I decided to check the references in Godwin’s diaries, which are lodged in the Bodleian Library. I have now been able to do so, and I find that the entries for these two dates do not read as Dr Byrne reported, but as follows: “Sup at Mrs Robinson’s, w.[ith] C.” There is a similar entry (not mentioned by Byrne), for 29 February 1796 (i.e. between the other two dates), which reads: “Sup at Mrs Robinson’s, w. C & Mrs Parsons.”
Was “C.” Coleridge, as Byrne
evidently assumed? It seems not. “C.” often appears in Godwin’s diaries around
this time: for example, Godwin dines with him (if it was a him) on 6, 29 and 31
December 1794, breakfasts with him on the 28th, and dines with him
on 8, 17, 18, and 27 January 1795. There are further references to “C.” at
other times, and at least one (on 17 March 1796) to “Mrs C.” If Coleridge were C., could he really have
conflated so many meetings into one? It is of course possible that he was not
telling the truth. But there is plenty of evidence to support Coleridge’s
veracity in this instance. Some of Godwin’s engagements with “C.” occur when
Coleridge is known to have been in
Moreover, if Coleridge were “C.”, one would expect Godwin to be consistent in the use of this convenient shortening. But both when they first met on 21 December 1794, and on the numerous occasions that they met subsequently, while Coleridge was in London during the period 1799-1800, Godwin always refers to Coleridge by his full name. I counted forty mentions in Godwin’s diaries of engagements with Coleridge, thirty-nine of them in the period 1799-1800; in every case his name was spelt out in full. In his diaries Godwin almost invariably spelt out the names of all those whom he met -- though he used his own idiosyncratic spelling.
So who was “C.”? I hope that some Godwin scholar may be able to identify this missing link. But whoever “C.” was, he wasn’t Coleridge. Thrilling though it would be to believe that Mary Robinson influenced the composition of “Kubla Khan”, the facts do not support this hypothesis.
© Adam Sisman 2004.