John Murray

John Murray first heard "Christabel" recited by Henry Crabb Robinson on 28 December 1814. Robinson writes in his diary: "[A]fter tea, I read Christabel to Mr. and Mrs. Pattison and Mr. Murray; the first of my hearers who have not relished the poem."(1) Murray's response to the poem is telling of his future attitude toward "Christabel" and Coleridge.

Murray and Coleridge met in the third week of April 1816 to discuss plans for printing "Christabel." Murray had by this time heard Walter Scott recite "Christabel" in June 1815 and did briefly possess a manuscript of Coleridge's poem.(2) Soon after receiving the Hutchinson transcript from Coleridge in late October, Byron forwarded it to Murray on 4 November 1815:

When you have been enabled to form an opinion of Mr. Coleridge's M.S. you will oblige me by returning it--as in fact I have no authority to let it out of my hands.--I think most highly of it--& feel anxious that you should be [the] publisher.(3)

If Murray recorded any thoughts on "Christabel" upon returning the manuscript to Byron, they have not survived. Byron, Coleridge and Murray do not appear to have discussed the future of "Christabel"--at least no surviving documents suggest that any conversations occurred--until April 1816.

Murray met Coleridge for the first time and agreed to print "Christabel" in April 1816. It was also in April--probably during the week of the 10th to 15th--that Coleridge first met Byron at Byron's house in Piccadilly, London, where, as Leigh Hunt records in his Autobiography, Coleridge recited "Kubla Khan." (4) Coleridge acknowledges in the preface to "Kubla Khan" that, the poem, like "Christabel," was published with Lord Byron's assistance: "The following fragment is here published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity."(5) In the week following Byron and Coleridge's meeting, Murray met Coleridge for the first time and they discussed the terms for the printing of "Christabel."

On 12 April 1816, Murray and Coleridge negotiated and drafted the following contract (endorsed May 1816) for the volume that includes "Christabel":

Mr. Murray agrees to give S.T. Coleridge Esq. the Sum of Sixty Seventy Guineas for the exclusive priveledge to publish Two poems first Cantos of his poem entitled Christabel & his poem entitled Kubla Khan until it the whole poem shall be completed when the copyright shall revert to the Author--& for permission to publish his poem entitled Kubla Khan which the Author shall not be restricted from publishing in any way that he pleases--the said sum of Seventy pounds--to include such all prefatory matter to the two poems & to be paid on the day of their publication.(6)

It is significant that the contract does not define the term "Canto." Given that "Christabel" remained on 12 April 1816 at the length that it had for 16 years (Part I, its Conclusion and Part II), was a "canto" deemed to consist of one Part and its Conclusion? Although the contract does not specify so, Coleridge's letter to Murray on 23 April 1816 suggests that Murray and Coleridge had agreed that a Conclusion to Part II would be required: "I have not felt myself well enough to finish the Conclusion of the 2nd Part of Christabel as I had wished."(7)

As of 23 April 1816, the 22-line poem that Coleridge included in a 6 May 1801 letter to Robert Southey more than likely formed all of the Conclusion to Part II. It seems more than likely that they stood in 1801 as Coleridge's first attempts at the second Conclusion, rather, than as many critics argue, a codicil that he attached as a make-shift Conclusion in 1816. E.H. Coleridge presents the former case persuasively:

[it has] been too hastily concluded that [the Conclusion to Part II] [has] nothing to do with Christabel, and [was] tacked on in 1816, merely to eke out the third folio of the pamphlet. The nexus between this so-called Conclusion and the closing lines of the Second Part is to be found in the implied comparison between Sir Leoline's wrath, the excess of bitterness and the mock resentment of love playing at wrath, which is none the less 'a fault and corruption' of this world of sin.(8)

The list of critics who disagree with E.H. Coleridge is too long to recount in full.(9) E.H. Coleridge's claim is supported in part by Coleridge's description of the lines to Southey as "a very metaphysical account of Fathers calling their children rogues, rascals, & varlets--&c--."(10) To view the lines as they appear in the Southey letter and in the 1816 printed edition, click here. These lines combined with a surviving 1800 holograph (now at Victoria College, University of Toronto) form the text of the 1816 edition of "Christabel."

Christabel: Kubla Khan, A Vision; The Pains of Sleep was released on 25 May 1816 with a plain brown cover, advertised in the Morning Chronicle (and the Literary Adviser) as follows:

In 8vo 4s 6d Christabel &tc. By S.T. Coleridge "That wild and singularly original and beautiful poem"--Lord Byron John Murray, Albermarle St. (11)

The three poems occupy 64 pages in an octavo volume, foreworded by 8 pages of prefatory material. Although the volume quickly became the target of a wave of hostile reviews throughout 1816, Murray produced 2 more issues in the summer of 1816. The three issues are identically collated, except for an altered title page: the second and third issues are entitled Christabel, etc. To view the 1816 text of "Christabel," click here.

Soon after "Christabel" issued from Murray's press, Coleridge assumed that Murray would remain his full-time publisher. Murray saw otherwise. Coleridge complains of Murray's decision to sever their professional relationship in a letter to John Gale on 8 July 1816:

It was likewise understood by me, that Mr. Murray was to be my Publisher for my works generally--The Sale of the Christabel sadly disappointed Mr. Murray. It was abused & ridiculed by the Edinburgh Review: & the Quarterly refused even to notice it... In this mood Mr. Murray expressed himself in such words, as led me, nervous & imperfectly recovered as I was, to suppose that he had no pleasure in this connection.(12)

Coleridge writes here of Murray's refusal to allow the Quarterly Review--a publication that Murray founded and controlled--to review Christabel: Kubla Khan, A Vision; The Pains of Sleep. He repeats his complaint to Murray himself, defending the value--economic and poetic--of the two Part "Christabel." He also expresses his disappointment that the Quarterly Review did not defend a publication from Murray's own press against the many hostile reviews that noticed "Christabel" in 1816-17. Coleridge writes Murray on 26 March 1817 that

the corrections and additions to the first Books of Christabel may become of more value to you when the work is finished, as I trust, it will be in the course of this Spring, than they are at present--and let it not be forgotten, that while I had the utmost malignity of personal Enmity to cry down the work, with the exception of Lord Byron there was not [one] of the many, who had for so many years together spoken so warmly in its praise who gave it the least positive Furtherance after its publication. It was openly asserted that the Quarterly Review did not wish to attack it, but were ashamed to say a word in its favor. Thank God! These things pass from me like Drops from a Duck's back, except as far as they take the Bread out of my mouth.(13)

1816 Christabel

Notes

1. Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley, 3 vols. (London, J.M. Dent and Sons, 1938), 1: 157. (back)
2. George Gordon Byron, Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand. 9 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap at Harvard University Press, 1973-79), 4: 318. (back)
3. Byron's Letters and Journals, 4: 331. (back)
4. Edmund Blunden, Leigh Hunt: A Biography (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1930), 93-94. (back)
5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E.H. Coleridge, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1912; Reprinted 1975), 1: 295. (back)
6. MS Sir John Murray reproduced in Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, E.L. Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956-71), 4: 634n1. (back)
7. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 4: 634. (back)
8. Christabel: A Facsimile of the Manuscript (London: Henry Frowde, 1907), 32. (back)
9. Generally, arguing that the Conclusion to Part II neither fits with the plot or the thematic concerns of "Christabel," the following critics view the Conclusion as an after-thought to Coleridge's original design: Arthur Wormhundt "Coleridge: 'Christabel', Part I; the 'Ancient Mariner'; 'Christabel', Part II The Demon Lover: A Psychoanalytical Approach to Literature (New York: Exposition, 1947), 46; Gerald Enscoe, "Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan' and 'Christabel': Studies in Ambiguity," Eros and the Romantics (Paris: Mouton, 1967), 58; Jonas Spatz, "The Mystery of Eros: Sexual Initiation in Coleridge's 'Christabel'," PMLA 90 (1975), 113; Charles Tomlinson, "S.T. Coleridge: Christabel," Interpretations: Twelve Essays on Twelve English Poems (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956), 86-112. Rpt in. The Ancient Mariner and Other Poems: A Casebook, ed. Alun R. Jones and William Tydeman (London: Mcmillan, 1973), 243; and, as recently as 1993, Tillotama Rajan remarks:
   

   The Conclusion to Part II has no obvious connection with the preceding narrative. Combined with the poem's publication beside the confessional 'The Pains of Sleep,' it encrypts the text in the recesses of Coleridge's personal life, as though he has defaced it by scrawling across it a piece of graffiti" ("Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the Textual Abject," Wordsworth Circle 24, (Spring 1993): 64. (back)

10. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2: 729. (back)
11. Morning Chronicle #14684 (25 May 1816), n.p. (back)
12. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 4: 650. (back)
13. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 4: 716-17. (back)