Reviewed by: Coleridge and the Romantic Newspaper: The "Morning Post" and the Road to "Dejection" by Heidi Thomson, and: Poets of the People's Journal: Newspaper Poetry in Victorian Scotland ed. by Kirstie Blair, and: The Life and Works of James Easson: The Dundee People's Poet ed. by Anthony Faulkes Simon Rennie (bio) Heidi Thomson, Coleridge and the Romantic Newspaper: The "Morning Post" and the Road to "Dejection" (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) pp. xii + 274, £66.99 cloth. Kirstie Blair, editor, Poets of the People's Journal: Newspaper Poetry in Victorian Scotland (Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2016) pp. xxix + 225, £14.95 cloth. Anthony Faulkes, editor, The Life and Works of James Easson: The Dundee People's Poet (Dundee: Thorisdal, 2016) pp. 181, £6 paperback. These three volumes represent in one sense a broad spectrum of scholarly genres, being respectively a biographical snapshot of a discrete period in a canonical writer's life, an anthology of pieces from the poetry pages of one newspaper, and the collected prose and verse of a celebrated working-class poet. And yet these books are all immersions in one particular subject: the publication of poetry in nineteenth-century newspapers. They all demonstrate the significance of newspaper publication to the poetic culture of the period in terms of its production, distribution, and reception. Reading these volumes, one is struck time and again by the centrality of periodical culture to the factors that drive discourse between poems, between poets, and between poets and the public. The fact of their generic disparity in terms of scholarly writing only serves to underline the breadth of the cultural phenomenon they illuminate. [End Page 662] Heidi Thomson's Coleridge and the Romantic Newspaper: The "Morning Post" and the Road to "Dejection" finds its focus in the crucial period between 1799 and 1802, which led to publication of the poet's famous ode in the London-published newspaper for which he contributed poetry and journalism at this time. There is already a good deal of literary biographical material on this period and the effects of the complex social nexus of the Coleridges, the Wordsworths, and the Hutchinsons on Coleridge's thought and writing, not least by commentators on the period including Richard Holmes and John Worthen. But this book's particular approach attempts to balance the biography with the context of the writer's publication of prose, poetry, and epigrams in the Morning Post. As Thomson states, many Coleridge scholars have already benefitted from the "massive legacy of his compulsion to record, analyse, and advertise his own emotions" (10). However, by tracing the writer's complex responses to shifts in his relationships with Sara Hutchinson and Wordsworth through a focussed interpretation of his Morning Post publications, Thomson complicates previous distinctions between public and private expression. Famously, of course, Coleridge's own marriage was floundering during this period, and his passion for Sara Hutchinson was integral to the first drafts of the poem. Much previous criticism has emphasised the distinction between Coleridge's two voices at this time: the public, highly encoded explorations of his emotional life through his poetry and the private voice revealed in sometimes extraordinarily frank letter writing as well as in conversations and behaviour reported by his close contemporaries. By concentrating her considerable interpretive skill on contextual readings of the epigrams, translations, and mass of poems (major and minor) published in the Morning Post during this period of emotional turmoil, Thomson has indeed, as she claims in her conclusion, offered a "deeper insight into the contradictory genius of Coleridge" (239). Ultimately, this book reassesses the extent to which Coleridge divulged his feelings about his attraction to Hutchinson and his increasing alienation from Wordsworth in the public space of the Morning Post. Seven chapters (after the introduction) trace the major events in Coleridge's life through the period 1799 to 1802 and offer readings of his publications in the newspaper, while a final chapter examines the ode itself in relation to its various iterations. A helpful appendix features the poem as it was published in this context. One of the original elements of this approach is that Thomson's eye is neither drawn excessively towards the...
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Nov 17, 2023
Sarah Seeley 
Open Access
