Coleridge, Christabel [etc.]

Coleridge, Christabel [etc.] (1816); review by ?Charles Lamb, Times, May 20, 1816, n. p. This review was first noted (and reprinted) by David V. Erdman in Texas Studies in English, XXXVII (1958), 53–60, and the review was reprinted once again and attributed to Lamb by Lewis M. Schwartz in Studies in Romanticism, IX (1970), 114–124. The attribution to Lamb rests chiefly on the following evidence. The “poetical critic” quoted on Burns’s Tam o’ Shanter was Wordsworth, whose Letter to a Friend of Burns Lamb had seen through the press just the month before this review. Lamb is known to have been aware of Coleridge’s publication being in press before May 20 (which was five days before Christabel was published); he was also familiar with the literary works quoted or alluded to — Virgil’s Aeneid, Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale, Milton’s Il Penseroso, etc. He had access to publish in the Times through his friendship with its editor John Stoddart, for whose New Times he later reviewed Keats’s Lamia volume. All these things are true, but Stoddart himself could have written the review, or so could two other writers for the Times, Thomas Barnes and Thomas Massa Alsager, who were both members of the Lamb-Coleridge-Wordsworth circles. Still, it is tempting to imagine this review to be the work of Lamb, even though he is reported to have declared at Godwin’s in July 1816 that Christabel “ought never to have been published, that no one understands it; and Kubla Khan ... is nonsense” (Fanny Imlay to Mary Shelley, July 29, 1816; Shelley and Mary, I, 109).