On Book Borrowing: Forming Part of a Literary History Seen Through the Perspective of a Book from Charles Lamb’s Library

DENISE GIGANTE On Book Borrowing: Forming Part of a Literary History Seen Through the Perspective ofa Book from Charles Lamb’s Library “I shall die soon, my dear Charles Lamb! and then you—will not be vexed that I had bescribbled your Books.” —Samuel Taylor Coleridge, May 2, 1811 C OLERIDGE WROTE THESE WORDS ON THE BACK FLYLEAF OF A COPY OF John Donne’s VUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA P oem s owned by Charles Lamb.1 It would not be the first book he returned to his friend with predictions of imminent death or marginalia destined to outlive both men. A few months later, in Lamb’s fo­ lio of the plays of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Coleridge prophe­ sied: “I shall not be long here, Charles! I gone, you will not mind my hav­ ing spoiled a book in order to leave a Relic.”2 In reality, Coleridge was nowhere near death, and while he may not have known that, he certainly d id know that he was not spoiling Lamb’s book. “Spite of Appearances,” he wrote on Lamb’s 1669 edition of Donne, “this Copy is the better for the Mss. Notes. The Annotator himself says so.”3 Lest there should be any doubt about the annotator, he signed the note (as he did others) “S.T.C.” Coleridge was a master of that scattered genre, marginalia, a term he him­ self coined. He was voluminous in his marginal commentary, so much I. Coleridge, T h e C ollected W o rks o f S a m u el T a ylo r C oleridge, 12 vols., ed. George Whalley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 12.2.243. Vol. 12, M a rg in a lia , is in 6 parts. 2. The book is in the British Museum; the comment is reprinted in “Appendix 3: Charles Lamb’s Books,” E. V. Lucas, T h e L ife o f C h a rles L a m b , 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: Methuen, [1905]), 2:313. 3. Coleridge, C ollected W o rks, 1 2 .2 .2 2 1 . S iR , 55 (Fall 2016) 369 370 DENISE GIGANTE so that Princeton University Press had to devote no less than six hefty volumes—one of them over twelve hundred pages—in his VUTSRQPONMLKJIH C ollected W o rks to it. In Lamb’s essay “The Two Races of Men,” Lamb spoke teasingly of the manuscript notes Coleridge left in his books as “vying with the origi­ nals” not only in quality, but also “not unfrequently” in terms of quantity.4 Indeed, Coleridge was not above commenting on his own comments. “N. B. Tho’ I have scribbled in it,” he wrote in Lamb’s copy of Donne, “this is & was Mr Charles Lamb’s Book, who is likewise the Possessor & (I believe) lawful Proprietor of all the Volumes of the ‘Old Plays’ excepting one.”5 6He was referring to the third volume of Lamb’s twelve-volume set of Robert Dodsley’s Select C ollection o f O ld P la ys, which he had lost. The volume included a revenge tragedy, a history, and three Jacobean comedies (John Webster’s T h e W h ite D eo il, Jasper Fisher’s F u im o s T roes, Robert Tailor’s T h e H o g H a th L o st his P earl, John Cooke’s G reen e’s T u Q u o q u e, and Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s T h e H o n est W h o re), and for Lamb, it was “perhaps the most valuable volume of them all.”*' Coleridge had borrowed it along with Lamb’s copies of Samuel Daniel’s P oem s and Philip Sidney’s A rcadia. “Pray, if you can,” Lamb pleaded, “re­ member what you did with it, or where you took it out with you a walk­ ing perhaps; for, to use the old plea, it spoils a set.”7 But Coleridge could n o t remember, and, on this occasion, having loaned his books to Coleridge, Lamb wound up with an unsightly gap in his bookshelves and two books...