"The Eo-nauts" (1813)

A curio, this: a pamphlet published in 1813 as by ‘Lemuel Gulliver’, supposedly a descendent of Swift's celebrated traveller, although in fact this was written by Elizabeth Susanna Graham (1764-1844, née Davenport, wife to and then widow of Thomas Graham, of Edmond Castle, Cumberland, and Lincoln's Inn [not to be confused with this Thomas Graham]). It's a poem written, so far as I can tell, in order to mock the East India Company Act of 1813, also known as the Charter Act 1813, which licensed the British East India Company's ongoing exploitation of India. Graham, fictionalising India as ‘Laputa’, appears to have regarded the whole enterprise as a reprise of the South Sea Bubble, from a century earlier. This is how the poem opens:

Impatient, on his oozy bed,
Where Fate so long had bound him
Rouz’d Speculation rears his head,
And wildly glares around him.

His bosom boils, his seething brains
With countless Visions teem;
His mind such wefted schemes contains
As wove the South Sea dream.

With Eastern treasures stor’d, he fills,
Or seems to fill his coffer,
And thinks to find the golden hills
And long lost mines of Ophir.

Of north-east passage without squalls,
He’s raving—sine fine-—
And veining Panama with CANALS,
For shorter cuts to China.

’Tis done! —the deed’s accomplish’d now—
The East’s wide trade is free;
And every bold adventurer’s prow
Darkens th’afrighted sea.

From Michael’s Mount to farthest North,
See bustle and confusion,
O’er whom, with wild shrieks, sallies forth
The Spirit of Delusion.

So why am I blogging about this obscure little tidbit on my Coleridge blog? Well, the whole poem is larded with sarcastic footnotes, containing many quotations, all made up by Graham but all attributed either to notable names or else to generic figures. As it might be:

There are loads of these, including pseudo-scholarly tables showing India to be so poor only a fool would think a fortune could be won there:

Anyway, late in the poem Graham includes a dig at Coleridge. This quatrain:

There Speculation’s sons may dash,
Where trade no bound restrains,
Which asks nor capital of cash,
Nor capital of brains.

—has the following note appended:

No such person as ‘Mr Wiske’ and no such play as China Hoy, although there certainly was a person called ‘Mr Coleridge’ of course. Still, 1813 seems to me late in the day to be twitting Coleridge for his Pantisocratic scheme, given that its failure was two decades in the past—if that is indeed what Graham is doing here. Perhaps Coleridge is invoked merely as the author of a well-known poem about a crazy sea-voyage. The archaic English is perhaps a dig at the olde-worlde Lyrical Ballads version of Ancient Mariner, and ‘Mr Wiske’ a jab at Wordsworth (although—why ‘whisk’? Why ‘China ahoy’? It can't be a ‘Kubla Khan’ thing since that poem, though written in 1797, wasn't published until 1816; and Graham didn't know or have any interactions with Coleridge. I remain puzzled.)