Here's an anecdote about Coleridge in Malta that I don't think anybody has noticed (it's buried in the middle of an 1862 Macmillan's Magazine review, by one ‘A Wilson’, of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poems; not the kind of place one might expect to find a story about Coleridge). The most detailed and thorough account of Coleridge's year and a half in Malta is Donald Sultana's Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Malta and Italy (Oxford: Blackwell 1969), and he nowhere mentions this little incident.
It's interesting because it cleaves to the popular prejudice about Coleridge as a dreamy-eyed poet unsuited to practical matters. This, it must be said, is really not the portrait of STC in Malta that emerges from Sultana's book (or from Richard Holmes's biography, which draws heavily on Sultana for its Malta sections). There the emphasis is on how hard Coleridge worked, and how effective an administrator he proved, passing a wide range of bandi (legislative proclamations), sitting-in on Sir Alexander Ball's cabinet meetings, attending court, overseeing oaths and sorting-out disagreements between locals, colonial officials, disputes between ships docked at the port and so on. This Macmillan's Magazine account has a ‘print the legend’ vibe about it, doesn't it. Although if, as he claims he did, ‘A Wilson’ heard it verbatim from somebody who had actually worked with Ball and Coleridge in Malta 1804-05, it might be true. (Although surely the peacock's feather pen is an embellishment? Or were they really a thing?)
Thinking more about this: how likely is it that "A. Wilson" actually spoke to someone who had worked with Coleridge in Malta? This review is 1862; even if Wilson is recalling some trip to the island in the mid-1850s (say), that's half a century after the events described. Just conceivably (though barely) an individual in Bell's Malta administration, presumably in a very junior position in 1805, was still living on the island in 1855, in their 70s or perhaps 80s. But if it's possible, is it likely?
ReplyDeleteNow, like a straw in the breeze, I'm blowing the other way. Having written that comment out, it doesn't seem to me so unlikely that Wilson might have met a 70something or 80something Maltese (native or English-extraction) in the 1850s who remembered Coleridge's stint at Ball's Public Secretary in 1805.
DeleteBut anyone remembering Coleridge by the 1850's would have had their memories coloured by popular knowledge of the formerly obscure poet whose celebrity only developed in the age of Byron. Back then, he was known as T.C.Colridge Esquire, "a gentleman well known in the literary world" ... https://books.google.ca/books?id=LQQcAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA86&lpg=PA86&dq=%2B"t.c.colridge"&source=bl&ots=kW4E_K-2Cn&sig=ACfU3U0CpbJGYdJTOq5afRsPXdYZxA0T6w&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiIw9D56u7tAhXvc98KHWonABEQ6AEwAHoECAIQAg#v=onepage&q=%2B%22t.c.colridge%22&f=false
DeleteThat's a great catch! T C Coleridge indeed. (It reminds me a little of the German magazine that praised C's poem "Christabel Kablakhan")
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