Abstract
Setting Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1817 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner within the context of his concerns in the Biographia Literaria and Letters to Chief Justice Fletcher about the revolutionary potential of unregulated language and mass print circulation, I suggest its marginal gloss dramatizes law’s failure to suppress radical sentiment and the inability of literary and legal expression to contain the revolutionary possibilities inherent in their own dissemination. Reading the Thomas Hardy trial as a traumatic cultural moment planting these traces in Coleridge’s later work, I claim the gloss undermines concurrent developments in legal interpretive practice by anticipating modern critical legal studies’ reevaluation of legal positivism.
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