Walter Scott

John Stoddart recited "Christabel" for Walter Scott in September or October 1802. At the time, Scott was working on The Lay of the Last Minstrel (printed in 1805) and although Scott did not at the time acknowledge an indebtedness to Coleridge's poem, The Lay echoes the content, style and the largely iambic tetrameter metre of "Christabel."(1) Following the appearance of The Lay, Coleridge's friends and family immediately noted the similarities between the two poems; indeed, talk of the parallels recurs throughout numerous letters of 1806 and 1807.(2) Coleridge, however, takes no notice of the similarities until the summer of 1807, when he first reads Scott's poems. The similarities speak for themselves: Scott's refrain "Jesu Maria, shield us well!," for example, repeats Coleridge's refrain "Jesu, Maria, shield her well!"(3) And the opening midnight scene and hypophoric gothic in Part I of "Christabel" are closely imitated by Scott toward the end of Canto 2 of The Lay:

Coleridge	Scott
Tis the middle of the night by the castle clock	At the sullen, moaning sound
And the owls have awaken'd the crowing cock	The ban-dogs bay and howl,
Tu--whit!---- Tu--whoo!...	And from the turret round
	Loud whoops the startled owl.
...Sir Leoline, the Baron rich,
Hath a toothless mastiff bitch;
From her kennel beneath the rock
She makes answer to the clock.

* * *

...The lady leaps up suddenly,	Is it the wind that swings the oaks?
The lovely lady, Christabel!	Is it the echo from the rocks?
It moan'd as near, as near can be,	What may it be, the heavy sound
But what it is, she cannot tell.--...	That moans old Brankstone's turret round?...(4)
...Is it the wind that moaneth bleak?

Although the parallels evince an indebtedness to Coleridge's poem, Scott does not admit to borrowing from "Christabel" until 1824, when, under pressure from Lord Byron, he confesses in a personal letter:

in [Byron's] conversations... I was lead to imitate the [style] of Coleridge's Christabelle in the Lay of the last Minstrel--it was true and Dr. Stoddart was the person who introduced me to that singular composition by reciting some stanzas of it many years since.(5)

A more public acknowledgement did not come until 1830, when Scott admits to his borrowings from "Christabel" in the introduction to his 1830 Poetical Works, and in footnotes to the 1832 reissues of Ivanhoe and The Abbot.

The potentially negative impact that the similarities between Scott's and Coleridge's poems could have upon the reception of "Christabel" is not lost upon Dorothy Wordsworth. She comments in 1807 that

the resemblance between certain parts of the Lay of the Last Minstrel and Christabel must strike everyone who is acquainted with the two poems... My Brother and Sister think that the Lay being published first, it will tarnish the freshness of Christabel, and considerably injure the first effect of it.(6)

Writing to Josiah Wedgewood on 25 June 1807, Coleridge too realizes the view that some readers may take of "Christabel":

I am at present on the eve of sending two Volumes of poetry to the press--the works of the past years. My Christabel, which has been most & generally admired, I have been told by Davy, Lamb, Mr. Sotheby, Sir G. and Lady Beaumont, and at least a dozen others, has been anticipated--as far as all originality of style and manner goes-- by a work which I have not read--and therefore cannot judge, how far the opinion just. If so, it is somewhat hard--for the author long before the composition publickly repeated mine.(7)

Coleridge's concern for the originality of "Christabel" leads him to pre-empt charges of plagiarism in the preface to the 1816 edition. But his and Dorothy's fears are confirmed by the charges of plagiarism against Coleridge lodged by an unwitting anonymous reviewer in the Augustan Review in July 1816. Curiously, however, the reviewer believes that the "friends in youth" passage in Part II (lines 396 to 414) imitates Lord Byron's poetry, not Scott's: "we have an imitation of some of those parts of Lord Byron's poetry which describe an utter desolation of mind."(8) Byron did in fact borrow directly from "Christabel" in the Siege of Corinth (1816) but he openly acknowledges doing so in a footnote to his poem. "Christabel" came to Byron's and John Murray's attention through Scott.

Notes

1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, E.L. Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956-71), 3: 356n1. (back)
2. See Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2: 1191 and 3: 42. (back)
3. Canto 1, line 5, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900). (back)
4. Lines of 1-3, 6-9, 39-42 and 46 of "Christabel" and lines 136-39 and 132-35 of the first Canto of The Lay of the Last Minstrel. (back)
5. The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H.J.C. Grierson, 12 vols. (London: Constable, 1932-37), 8: 421. (back)
6. William Wordsworth, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: Early Letters, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd ed. rev. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 533-34. (back)
7. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 3: 21. (back)
8. The Romantics Reviewed, Part A: The Lake Poets, ed. Donald H. Reiman, 2 vols. (New York: Garland, 1972), 1: 35-36. (back)