Coleridge's contributions to periodical literature

Abstract

Before I begin this study it will be useful to indicate its scope, and the reasons for its existence. First of all its scope. The subject is Coleridge's contributions to periodical literature, but I have not included all such contributions. To do so would be to impose a spurious completeness on my work. In order to give it instead an organic unity, I have set on one side Coleridge's contributions to the newspapers, all isolated reviews such as that on Clarkson's History of the African Slave Trade, all letters by Coleridge that have been published in the periodical press, and all contributions, whatever their nature or destination, which made their appearance after the 1818 edition of the Friend, Moreover, I have confined myself to prose contributions. The poetical ones have received from Coleridge's editors more attention than their deserve, lost of them are palpably magazine verse. I have therefore concerned myself mainly with two coherent bodies of Coleridgean material: his periodicals, the V at oilman and the Friends and his contributions, most of them written before 1800 and many of them hitherto unidentified, to the Critical Review and the monthly Magazine. To these two subjects I have judged it profitable to add a third, and give some account of periodical literature between 1700 and 1810. Have been interested less in technical detail, which can basically be found elsewhere, than in comparison, gathering together, interpretation.