The context of this odd little Feliks Topolski-style drawing is interesting, actually. STC is writing to his friend John Morgan from Kendal, telling him in detail about his recent travels via Preston and Liverpool. In the latter city he discovered ‘a Dutch-German Jeweller’ who ‘has discovered a mode of coloring white & yellow Cornelians of any color—but I observed that the red was far deeper than that of any natural red Cornelian.’ Coleridge says that this jeweller has offered to cut ‘my Mary and Charlotte seal’ into one of these cornelians, ‘coloring the Letters green or purple’ adding ‘I mean to have it thus:’ Then he has drawn his scribbly self-portrait, and below that he’s drawn a rough circle in which he fits the letters “C//M STC M//B” over three lines. MM is Mary Morgan, John’s sister and CB Charlotte Brent, a mutual friend (Coleridge had a—not too serious, I think—romantic crush on both women around this time). So: presumably he started out trying to sketch the way he wanted his seal cut, botched the lettering and in scribbling it out turned it into a portrait of himself—there’s no doubting the resemblance: this is when STC starts to become self-conscious about his corpulence, and his blank, open-mouthed resting face. The seal becomes the visage!
The context of this odd little Feliks Topolski-style drawing is interesting, actually. STC is writing to his friend John Morgan from Kendal, telling him in detail about his recent travels via Preston and Liverpool. In the latter city he discovered ‘a Dutch-German Jeweller’ who ‘has discovered a mode of coloring white & yellow Cornelians of any color—but I observed that the red was far deeper than that of any natural red Cornelian.’ Coleridge says that this jeweller has offered to cut ‘my Mary and Charlotte seal’ into one of these cornelians, ‘coloring the Letters green or purple’ adding ‘I mean to have it thus:’ Then he has drawn his scribbly self-portrait, and below that he’s drawn a rough circle in which he fits the letters “C//M STC M//B” over three lines. MM is Mary Morgan, John’s sister and CB Charlotte Brent, a mutual friend (Coleridge had a—not too serious, I think—romantic crush on both women around this time). So: presumably he started out trying to sketch the way he wanted his seal cut, botched the lettering and in scribbling it out turned it into a portrait of himself—there’s no doubting the resemblance: this is when STC starts to become self-conscious about his corpulence, and his blank, open-mouthed resting face. The seal becomes the visage!
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