The Friend
COLERIDGE, Samuel Taylor
Penrith: Printed and published by J. Brown.. 1809-10.
Description:
First edition. 8vo. 255x160mm. pp. 448. Contemporary blue-grey boards, grey paper backstrip, pages uncut. Protected by a loose buckram cover and housed in a slipcase. Repair to spine, joints and to hinges at the gutter. Surface crack to spine, corners slightly worn. Internally very good but with some marking and foxing and a little crinkling to the edges of some leaves. Each issue has the revenue duty stamp. Front pastedown has book label of Mary Elizabeth Hudson and the very discreet label W.A.S. which is William A. Strutz who purchased it on April 13 1965 at Parke Bernet through Seven Gables Bookshop (invoice loosely inserted). An anonymous note mentions a comment made by Mark Reed (the Wordsworth scholar) that the best copy of The Friend he had seen was offered to him by Seven Gables although he didn't buy it.
Complete in twenty-seven issues with the unnumbered "supernumerary Essay" issued on January 11, 1810 between numbers 20 and 21. Each issue runs to sixteen pages. Although (as Wise says) the final issue of 15 March 1810 "ends with the words "To be continued in the next Number," no 'next Number' ever appeared". Wise, 20, p71.
In 1808, Coleridge moved, with his family, to Wordsworth's house in Grasmere and began to think about a weekly magazine in which he could begin to set out his thoughts towards a philosophical system, both moral and political. He had high ambitions for The Friend. It would appear weekly and was intended "for those, who by Rank, or Fortune, or official Situation, or Talents and Habits of Reflection, are to influence the Multitude." Dorothy Wordsworth wondered who, after a hard day's work, would have the time or mental space to sit down and wrestle with Coleridge's "serious thought" but Coleridge fully intended to bring readers up to his level, not write down to theirs. Given the speed with which each issue was produced and the need to spend a day walking to Penrith to deliver his copy to the printer, there are some lighter touches in many of the issues – even Coleridge couldn't operate at an intellectual white heat all the time. But, in the main, The Friend is serious and difficult. Coleridge aimed at upholding "those truths and those merits which are founded in the nobler and permanent parts of our nature, against the caprices of fashion." If one were searching for an intellectual autobiography of Coleridge, one might perhaps locate it in The Friend for it is here that we see a mental to-ing and fro-ing, something of a struggle and working-out between revolutionary radicalism and a more reflective adoption of tradition, convention and custom. Coleridge described The Friend as "the History of my own mind". That mind was vast and the manner in which The Friend ranges over the complexities of politics, philosophy and theology is a formidable testimony to it.
Description:
First edition. 8vo. 255x160mm. pp. 448. Contemporary blue-grey boards, grey paper backstrip, pages uncut. Protected by a loose buckram cover and housed in a slipcase. Repair to spine, joints and to hinges at the gutter. Surface crack to spine, corners slightly worn. Internally very good but with some marking and foxing and a little crinkling to the edges of some leaves. Each issue has the revenue duty stamp. Front pastedown has book label of Mary Elizabeth Hudson and the very discreet label W.A.S. which is William A. Strutz who purchased it on April 13 1965 at Parke Bernet through Seven Gables Bookshop (invoice loosely inserted). An anonymous note mentions a comment made by Mark Reed (the Wordsworth scholar) that the best copy of The Friend he had seen was offered to him by Seven Gables although he didn't buy it.
Complete in twenty-seven issues with the unnumbered "supernumerary Essay" issued on January 11, 1810 between numbers 20 and 21. Each issue runs to sixteen pages. Although (as Wise says) the final issue of 15 March 1810 "ends with the words "To be continued in the next Number," no 'next Number' ever appeared". Wise, 20, p71.
In 1808, Coleridge moved, with his family, to Wordsworth's house in Grasmere and began to think about a weekly magazine in which he could begin to set out his thoughts towards a philosophical system, both moral and political. He had high ambitions for The Friend. It would appear weekly and was intended "for those, who by Rank, or Fortune, or official Situation, or Talents and Habits of Reflection, are to influence the Multitude." Dorothy Wordsworth wondered who, after a hard day's work, would have the time or mental space to sit down and wrestle with Coleridge's "serious thought" but Coleridge fully intended to bring readers up to his level, not write down to theirs. Given the speed with which each issue was produced and the need to spend a day walking to Penrith to deliver his copy to the printer, there are some lighter touches in many of the issues – even Coleridge couldn't operate at an intellectual white heat all the time. But, in the main, The Friend is serious and difficult. Coleridge aimed at upholding "those truths and those merits which are founded in the nobler and permanent parts of our nature, against the caprices of fashion." If one were searching for an intellectual autobiography of Coleridge, one might perhaps locate it in The Friend for it is here that we see a mental to-ing and fro-ing, something of a struggle and working-out between revolutionary radicalism and a more reflective adoption of tradition, convention and custom. Coleridge described The Friend as "the History of my own mind". That mind was vast and the manner in which The Friend ranges over the complexities of politics, philosophy and theology is a formidable testimony to it.