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  • A Book I Value: Selected Marginalia
  • Anthony John Harding (bio)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. A Book I Value: Selected Marginalia. Edited by H.J. Jackson Princeton University Press. xxiv, 246. US $17.95

At one time, Milton's claim in Areopagitica that 'Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are' would be quoted by English teachers of the more traditional kind to encourage respect for the sanctity of print. Scribbling in the margins would be regarded with horror. In a way, however, the impulse to use the white space at the edge of the page as a means of talking back to the author is a recognition of how right Milton was. Books are active things, and the marginal note testifies to this living quality in the printed word, which electronic media, with all their purported flexibility, still lack. You cannot write marginalia on a website.

Coleridge raised the writing of marginalia to a high art, adding value to the books that came his way, so that his friends began lending him books with the express purpose of inviting him to write notes in them. H.J. Jackson, whose Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (2001) contains the slightly alarming confession that 'Coleridge's marginalia converted me to writing in books,' has collected in this volume 279 of the most vigorous of Coleridge's marginalia from the six-volume Bollingen edition, creating 'a [End Page 434] sampler for readers who are interested in Coleridge ... and ready to venture beyond the few canonical poems and essays into uncharted territory.' A certain favourable disposition towards Coleridge is thus presupposed, but it is possible that the marginalia collected here may attract some readers who are not especially enthusiastic about his poetry and find his essays diffuse. The writer of these marginalia is more like the Coleridge of Table Talk and the later notebooks: informal but incisive, capable of asking fruitful questions that still occupy the minds of philosophers, psychologists, critics, and theologians. Though written in margins or on endpapers, these notes are usually not epigrammatic: many are almost mini-essays. Indeed, Coleridge invented a new kind of marginal note, the 'extended personal reflection.'

Besides adding to the history of print culture, A Book I Value should challenge some prejudices about the later Coleridge, often written off as conservative and religious by those for whom these terms constitute sufficient reason to ignore him. His 'conservative' opposition to the Reform Bill was based on principles that democrats would do well to reflect on, for he wanted MPs to be the 'Representatives' of thoughtful, responsible subjects, and in an era when corrupt electoral practices were rife and there was no secret ballot, Coleridge had the not unreasonable fear that elections would become chaotic popularity contests and MPs mere 'Delegates of the Rabble.' His deep religious faith did not prevent him from criticizing the Church, or from considering the Bible as 'many & various Writings of so many, various, and distant ages.' Nevertheless, it would be wrong to look for a modernizing Coleridge. He was 'profoundly counter-Enlightenment,' as Jackson observes. The deepest affinity apparent in these marginalia is with the divines of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, men such as Baxter and Leighton (both Presbyterians who managed to come to terms with episcopacy), Richard Hooker, Jeremy Taylor, and the platonizing Henry More. The sermons of Donne, the poetry of Herbert and Milton, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and Jonson's Volpone all earn positive annotations. Defoe and Swift, by contrast, come in for sharply critical commentary. Even in the notes on Kant and Schelling, Coleridge seems chiefly concerned to seek evidence that they leave open a way to the fullness of spiritual life which he found in the seventeenth century.

In the interests of presenting a clean text, the editor omits the often complicated footnotes of the Collected Coleridge, replacing them with brief headnotes. This inevitably leaves some mysteries unexplained; but the reader who wants to know what are the 'three primary Energies of Consciousness,' or what is the difference between a 'possibility' and a 'potentiality...

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