Henry Crabb Robinson

Coleridge writes to Henry Crabb Robinson on 12 March 1811 about his fondness for Catherine Clarkson: "had she been my Sister, I should have been a great man. I never saw a woman yet, whom I could so imagine to have [been] born of one parent with me at Birth, as Catherine Clarkson."(1) Although Robinson may have first encountered "Christabel" through Charles Lamb prior to 1811, the earliest documentable recitation of "Christabel" to Robinson is by Clarkson in 1811--reading from the Stoddart transcript given to her by Coleridge in 1806.(2) Robinson records in his diary on 9 October 1811:

...[In the] evening took tea with Mrs. Clarkson; she read Christabel to me. It has great beauties and interests more than any so small a fragment I ever met with, and that purely by the force of poetic painting... It is written in irregular rhyme, and was lent to Walter Scott before the publication of any of his poems. Coleridge and his friends consider Scott as having stolen the verse....(3)

Although Robinson also includes in his diary entry a long paraphrase of the poem's plot, it is uncertain if the second Stoddart copy was occasionally loaned to him by Clarkson. By 1814, Robinson begins to recite "Christabel" regularly and either does so from memory (supplemented by the sketch of "Christabel" in his diary), or, more likely, from Clarkson's Stoddart copy that he could have presumably borrowed. Robinson records that on 3, 4, 19, 28 December 1814 and on 14 March 1815 he recited "Christabel" to a number of friends.(4) Among his audience on 19 December 1814 is a "Miss Vardel," who, shortly after hearing "Christabel," writes a continuation of the poem. Also among Robinson's audience on 28 December is John Murray--the publisher who eventually prints "Christabel."

But Robinson's enthusiasm for "Christabel" extends beyond his numerous recitations of the poem. He is thought to have penned a review of the poem for the Critical Review--more than likely at the request of John Payne Collier, who was also a fan of "Christabel." The notice appeared during the third week of May, days before "Christabel" issued from John Murray's press on Saturday, 25 May.

Robinson uses his Critical review of "Christabel" as a platform from which to rebuke review journal practices of the day. He suggests that too often reviewers "damn the worth they cannot imitate," although, curiously, his own assessment of "Christabel" is couched in an unflattering metaphor: "[readers] may find in the fragment before us some food to satisfy their diseased appetites."(5) He speculates that "the opinion of nine-tenths, we will not say of the world, but of the attentive readers of poetry" will be "that the poem is one of the most trifling, inconclusive, unsatisfactory performances." Robinson's hypothesis is verified by William Hazlitt who begins his Examiner review of "Christabel" with the pronouncement that "the fault of Mr. Coleridge is that he comes to no conclusion."(6) Robinson, like Charles Lamb, is interested in the poem's composition history and in its future completion--its unpredictable but hoped-for conclusion:

when [I] read the story in M.S. two or three years ago, it appeared to be one of those dreamlike productions whose charm partly consists in the undefined obscurity of the conclusion--what the conclusion may be, no person who reads the commencement will be able to anticipate.(7)

His comments are telling of the future composition of "Christabel." The poem is continued not by Coleridge but by many satirists and parodists as well as by serious imitators, like "Miss Vardel."(8)

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Notes

1. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E.L. Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956-71), 3: 307. (back)
2. Neither Robinson or Lamb record any commentary on "Christabel" in relation to one another in their personal or published writings. (back)
3. Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley, 3 vols. (London, J.M. Dent and Sons, 1938), 1: 47. (back)
4. Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers, 1: 155-57, 164. (back)
5. Romantics Reviewed, Part A: The Lake Poets, ed. Donald H. Reiman, 2 vols. (New York: Garland, 1972), 1: 317. (back)
6. Romantics Reviewed, 1: 269, 2: 530. (back)
7. Romantics Reviewed, 1: 317. (back)
8. Walter Hamilton notes thirteen continuations and parodies of "Christabel" in Parodies of the Works of English and American Author, 6 vols. (London: Reeves and Turner, 1888; reprinted Hildesheim: Olms, 1970), 5: 127-36. Of these thirteen, Hamilton reproduces four in their entirety. Similarly, Ernest Hartley Coleridge notes eight and reproduces Anna Vardill's continuation in its entirety in Christabel: A Facsimile of the Manuscript (London: Henry Frowde, 1907), 103-10. (back)