"Monumental Inscriptions": Language, Rights, the Nation in Coleridge and Horne Tooke

In September 1798 Coleridge wrote to his wife from Hamburg, confirming his safe arrival, informing her that “Johnson, the Bookseller” had given him favourable terms on “The Epea Pteroenta, an Essay on Population, and a History of Paraguay,” and indicating that these three books were to arrive “directed to Poole / & for Poole’s Reading.”¹ Written in the year that saw a new edition of volume one of John Horne Tooke’s Epea Pteroenta, or The Diversions of Purley, the letter is evidence of Coleridge’s continuing interest in the well-known radical political figure, to whom he had first been drawn some years earlier. ² Another important aspect of this communication with Sara, however, is Coleridge’s revelation that he effectively purchased Diversions by permitting Johnson to publish a “little Poem” that Griggs identifies as Fears in Solitude, Written in 1798, during the Alarm of an Invasion. To which are added, France, an Ode; and Frost at Midnight. ³ Poetry has often been neglected by commentators upon the writings of Coleridge and John Horne Tooke, but this article will use “Fears in Solitude” and “France, an Ode” from 1798 to offer a new interpretation of the politics of a radical philosophy of language at the end of the eighteenth century. ⁴ In examining both the literary and non-literary representation of materialist theories of language, my aim is also to indicate how a reading of Coleridge’s poetry can be used to address critical accounts of Diversions that struggle to fit its historical significance into accepted readings of the nineteenth-century study of language in England.

It is well known that Coleridge was attracted to the author of Diversions by his political notoriety, as expressed in a poem of 1796:

Patriot and Sage! whose breeze-like Spirit first The lazy mists of Pedantry dispers’d (Mists in which Superstition’s pigmy band Seem’d Giant Forms, the Genii of the Land!), Thy struggles soon shall wak’ning Britain bless, And Truth and Freedom hail thy wish’d success. Yes Tooke! tho’ foul Corruption’s wolfish throng Outmalice Calumny’s imposthum’d Tongue, Thy Country’s noblest and determin’d Choice, Soon shalt thou thrill the Senate with thy voice ⁵

The poem is testimony to Coleridge’s own political fervor, written at a time when it was becoming apparent that the nation’s “Senate” intended to silence Horne Tooke’s “voice.” ⁶ As the end of the century drew closer, however, Coleridge’s fascination with Horne Tooke was confined to the radical theory of language he expounded in Diversions. This has attracted considerable critical comment. In 1919, James Holly Hanford referred to how Coleridge shared the “active interest in etymology and philosophical grammar which preceded in England and Germany the great discoveries of Schlegel, Bopp, and Grimm,” concluding that his “enthusiasm for such study was probably first aroused by Horne Tooke’s influential Diversions of Purley.” ⁷ In a piece inspired by Hanford and published in 1936, L. A. Willoughby describes how Horne Tooke featured large in Coleridge’s understanding of “the state of linguistic knowledge in England towards the end of the century,” even though he “was vexed with him in later life ‘for converting so beautiful, so divine a subject as language into the vehicle or make-weight of political squibs’ [Table Talk, May 7, 1830].” ⁸ According to H. J. Jackson, it “is no accident that the period of Coleridge’s active use of etymology coincides with the time when John Horne Tooke’s etymological theory, formulated in The Diversions of Purley, enjoyed its greatest prestige and popularity.” He argues that the “young Coleridge was a particularly apt pupil for Tooke’s system,” and although he notes that “Coleridge’s sense of opposition towards Tooke had crystallized by 1810,” he stresses that it “is a mark of the value of the etymological method to Coleridge that it survived his disenchantment with its exponent.”⁹ For his part, A. C. Goodson takes Coleridge’s December 17, 1800, letter to John Thelwall to identify Coleridge’s “‘metaphysical Investigation’ of language and...