Writing in Dissent: Coleridge and the Poetry of the Monthly Magazine

On January 18, 1796, Joseph Johnson published a prospectus promising ‘A New Miscellany, to be entitled, the Monthly Magazine: or, British Register.’ On its publication on the 1 March, it was to set about ‘the spread of light and knowledge’, its ‘GENERAL purpose [being] to forward the progress of mental improvement upon the most liberal and unshackled plan’, under the ‘Direction of eminent Literary Characters’. Jon Klancher has pointed to the ways in which, through this miscellaneous quality, ‘The Monthly represented a new kind of ideologically cohesive discursive community’. That sense of the Monthly as ‘new’ should, however, be put alongside Klancher’s observation that its identity as a ‘miscellany’ also points back to an earlier eighteenth-century tradition: The monthly “miscellany” journals – from Edward Cave’s Gentleman’s Magazine (1731) and Percival Stockdale’s Universal Magazine (1747) to Richard Phillips’ Monthly Magazine (1796) – appeared to be written by their own readers, who signed articles with mock-Roman pseudonyms as though they were personal letters [...] Each journal offered itself as a tightly knit community of readers and writers who revolve between reading roles and writing roles ... Klancher thoughtfully reinterprets Habermas’s notion of the evolution of the ‘public sphere’, where the polite exchange of the ‘miscellany’ periodical supersedes the courtly sociability of the coffeehouse, as ‘the journal displaces the public gathering place’. The Monthly, however, seems to complicate Klancher’s own model of change and evolution, since it represents both a survival of an earlier eighteenth-century mode and a ‘new kind of ideologically cohesive discursive community’. It is the ambiguous status of the Monthly, looking both forward and back, which forms the starting point for this essay. While the Monthly insistently engages in debates of the 1790s, it employs earlier models of friendship, exchange and sociability to do so, especially, as I show here, in its explorations of concepts of public and private. While Klancher’s image of the ‘transauthorial discourse’ of Romantic-era periodicals remains a useful starting point for an understanding of how and why a particular culture of exchange and response was put forward in the Monthly, borrowing both from established traditions of Dissenting education, and from the

literature of sensibility, the essential fragility of such a construct also needs to be borne in mind.We need to ask how an individual author might feel about participating in such a collective, 'transauthorial' enterprise, and how it might be questioned from within.This essay, then, while it builds on Klancher's subtle readings of the ways in which the Monthly encourages readerly participation, seeks to challenge his portrayal of it as an 'ideologically cohesive' periodical.Instead, I read the Monthly as a site of ongoing debate and argument, where reader and writer do not so much exchange roles as contest them, and where notions of public and private are constantly questioned.
To do so, I want to turn to the figure behind another miscellany also published for the first time on March 1 st , 1796: S. T. Coleridge.His Watchman, headed by the blazing motto, 'That all may know the Truth, and that the Truth may make us free!', bore a similar emphasis on 'the diffusion of knowledge'.As editor of a journal broadly similar in outlook, a supporter of the Monthly Magazine, and a contributor to its poetry section, Coleridge allows us a particularly interesting insight into the complex construction of the periodical 'voice' in the late eighteenth century.
Simultaneously showing great interest in, and support for, the kind of ideology put forward by the Monthly, he also wants to mark out his difference as a poet: his individuality in the face of the 'transauthorial'.This fractured and difficult relationship between the individual and the periodical voice both reflects and helps to shape major political, cultural and social debates of the 1790s.As Coleridge negotiated his individual role within the larger context of the periodical he was also, like so many other writers of the period, struggling to articulate his own social stance, to work out a way between retreat and engagement, and to reconcile concepts of private affection, sympathy, and wider benevolence.These issues keenly concerned him as individual, as poet, and as contributor to the Monthly, since his negotiations with concepts of retreat and privacy versus engagement and the public sphere were enmeshed with his participation and his self-presentation in periodical culture.This key debate, in different forms, has long been a staple of Romantic criticism: ranging from M. H. Abrams' discussion of the way in which the privacy of the Romantic lyric works toward spiritual selfrenewal, to Majorie Levinson's famous description of the 'suppression of the social' in 'Tintern Abbey'. 4More recent Romantic critical approaches have sought to read Romantic social engagement from a different angle, either in terms of poetic style or of interaction and collaboration with others.Sarah Zimmerman's thoughtful recasting of the Romantic lyric, for example, emphasises 'the subtle indirection of the mode's capacity for social engagement'. 5Clara Tuite and Gillian Russell, introducing the essay-collection Romantic Sociability, similarly challenge what they term Romanticism's traditional identification with the lone poet, withdrawn into productive introspection, with individualism rather than collective activity, and with the cultivation of the authentic rather than the performative self. 6nstead, they argue, uncovering patterns of sociability and exchange in the Romantic period helps us to recognise the ways in which the 'two-phase model of the public sphere' put forward by Habermas can be re-read.Romantic sociable culture, they contend, 'does not suggest a simple eclipse of the coffee-house model of the public sphere but what might be described as its apotheosis as critique'. 7This new approach provides a very useful starting point for a reading of the ways in which the Monthly might both continue and challenge earlier models of engagement and exchange, thematically and formally.
I focus my discussion particularly on its poetry pages, where questions about the role of the poet in relation to the individual reader and to wider society are frequently raised, in terms both of subject matter and form.The sonnet-form, for example, is repeatedly employed and, moreover, challenged through parodic rewriting by Coleridge and others, as I discuss at length in the third section of the essay.The way in which the sonnet is thus interrogated is a particularly fascinating one in the context of the periodical, and, specifically, the Monthly.On one level, parody allows the writer to challenge and unsettle the grounds of his or her participation in the 'transauthorial' voice of the periodical -parodies are, in the words of Cyril Connolly, 'a womb with a view', a protective defence for the writer uncertain of audience reaction.On another level, the reader of the Monthly, through the humour of the parody and through the miscellaneous format of the periodical, is also invited to question the relationship between the introspection of the poetry of sensibility and the issues of social engagement dealt with elsewhere in the periodical.
Secondly, I argue, the dialogue between writer and periodical which underpins my essay finds a loose parallel in the relationship between literature and the press.
The two concepts, of the individual writer and of the periodical, are constantly in dialogue, but also, sometimes simultaneously, in conflict.Coleridge's 'Nehemiah Higginbottom' sonnets, for example, published in November 1797, are usually discussed in strictly literary terms, reflecting his relationship with Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd; rarely, if ever, are they placed in the context of the press, of the lively atmosphere of exchange and debate fostered by its publisher Johnson, its founder Richard Phillips, and the editor John Aikin in the Monthly.I therefore want to resituate these sonnets in the context of the periodical, and in doing so to illuminate what Laurel Brake and Julie Codell have characterised as 'the encounters' of the press: to reconstruct not one 'transauthorial' identity, but instead 'the multi-vocal discourse of periodical texts by editors, writers, and readers'. 8This is a particularly appropriate concept to apply to the Monthly Magazine, characterised by the miscellaneous quality produced by the multiple 'Original Communications' and 'voluntary contributions' solicited by Johnson and Phillips and directed, although not, as we will see, entirely controlled, by Aikin.

I The Monthly Magazine
The Monthly was astutely aimed at a particular readership, which it was simultaneously helping to create: in the words of Marilyn Butler, it 'high-mindedly projected an ideal of liberal, middle-class intellectuality'. 9It borrowed both from the miscellaneous, wide-ranging format of earlier successes such as The Gentleman's Magazine, and also from the reformist agendas of papers such as John Thelwall's The Tribune, but it packaged them in a way designed to draw in the serious, middle-class reader, as its price, one shilling, indicated.Johnson and Phillips had a particular sort of emergent reader in mind: the provincial Dissenter, newly prosperous, perhaps, through trade, and beginning to exert influence in the community.This, too, was the  10 The Monthly, on the other hand, did not set itself in competition with daily newspapers.Instead, it relied on a network of readers around the country who supplied news, agricultural reports and local observations, into which the essays and poems were interwoven, often provoking responses from the readers themselves and thus bringing together metropolitan, provincial, and European concerns.So, while Coleridge's Watchman failed in May 1796, the Monthly became, in the words of Michael Scrivener, 'the most important middle-class periodical [….], radical in its way for representing the concerns of the most insurgent and innovative sectors of the intelligentsia'. 11Coleridge concluded the Watchman by urging his readers to turn to the Monthly: […] long may it continue to deserve the support of the Patriot and the Philanthropist, and while it teaches RATIONAL LIBERTY, prepare its readers for the enjoyment of it, strengthening the intellect by SCIENCE, and softening our affections by the GRACES! 12 Phillips, in particular, was in a good position to understand the implications of that phrase, 'rational liberty': he had been imprisoned for eighteen months for selling Paine's Rights of Man in early 1793. 13As Leigh Hunt would do, Phillips continued to edit his radical newspaper, the Leicester Herald, from within Leicester prison.That his Paineite loyalties remained undimmed after his imprisonment is clear from the signature, 'Common Sense', which accompanied his biting articles in the Monthly.
Phillips' fate would, in early 1798, befall Johnson, too, when he was imprisoned for selling copies of Gilbert Wakefield's A Reply to Some Parts of the Bishop of Llandaff's Address.Both publisher and founder of the Monthly, therefore, had strong radical tendencies and a wide network of Dissenting sympathisers.To complement this, they made a shrewd choice of editor, the Unitarian doctor and poet, John Aikin.
The years of Aikin's editorship, between 1796 and 1806, were by far the most lively, and profitable. 14Early contributors included friends and family: Aikin's sister Anna Letitia Barbauld published essays and poetry, and his good friend William Enfield, formerly tutor of belles lettres at the Warrington Academy and, by 1796, preacher at the Octagon chapel, Norwich, contributed an essay series under the signature of the 'Enquirer'.Barbauld and Enfield were joined by numerous contributors from the Johnson circle, including Mary Hays and Mary Wollstonecraft.
Their essays appeared, as the prospectus promised, in the context of 'original communications' from readers, participating in debates on topics such as female education, the treatment of animals, and the setting up of book-clubs.
Alongside these debates, one of the most interesting aspects of the Monthly was its assertion that it would attempt to set a standard of 'poetical merit' in its pages, actively challenging and questioning contemporary stereotypes of 'Magazine-poetry'.
Maintaining that 'the term Magazine-poetry, has usually been considered as synonymous with the most trivial and imperfect attempts at writing verse,' the Monthly promised instead 'true genius and correct taste'. 15Regular contributors included William Shepherd, Gilbert Wakefield, John Thelwall, and J. W. Rutt, who also contributed to the Morning Chronicle and the Cambridge Intelligencer.
Coleridge and Wordsworth, as is well known, conceived the 'Ancient Mariner' with a view to publishing it in the Monthly to raise funds for their German trip; and the last part of this essay will deal with some of the poems which Coleridge, alongside Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd, did publish in its pages.Their contributions are significant, since, unlike the poetry Coleridge was publishing in the Watchman, they are not all overtly radical.While the Monthly did occasionally publish political songs of the sort found in plebeian periodicals, such as Thelwall's 'Glee', its poetry is, for the most part, the poetry of sensibility, with a strong emphasis on friendship and sympathetic response, which becomes politicised by context.
Although not all contributors were Unitarian, the literary atmosphere created within the Monthly was shaped by the friendship and writing networks of Dissent.
Johnson, Phillips and Aikin had strong Unitarian allegiances; Johnson, indeed, had helped Theophilus Lindsey to finance the first avowedly Unitarian meeting house, Essex Street Chapel in London.The atmosphere Aikin sought to recreate within the periodical was informed by his experience of the Dissenting Academy in Warrington, and his Unitarian belief in the social and friendly aspects of religion, shared and reinforced by contributors such as Enfield.Enfield, alongside Unitarian divines such as Price and Toulmin, emphasized the importance of 'love and friendship' built up through habitual, shared worship, and constantly reinforced within familial structures. 16In his highly successful volume, Sermons for the Use of Families, published in several editions by Johnson, Enfield emphasises the importance of 'wellregulated' family affections: 'those benevolent affections which are the foundation of all social virtue'. 17Similarly, a central tenet of the Dissenting Academies was an emphasis on sociable, companionable learning, characterised by this idea of benevolent, familial affection.The Annual Reports of the Warrington Academy lay stress upon the way in which tutors and students 'live together in the highest Friendship and Harmony'. 18And this picture of the Dissenting tutors is corroborated by Lucy Aikin, daughter of John Aikin, junior, niece of Anna Letitia Barbauld: 'they and theirs,' she writes to Henry Bright, 'lived together like one large family'. 19deed, Aikin's best-selling work for children, written with Barbauld, carries this same emphasis on the diffusion of knowledge within a framework of affection.
Evenings at Home, or the Juvenile Budget Opened, first published in 1792 and reprinted countless times through the nineteenth century, takes as its premise the image of a dutifully discursive family, the Fairbornes, who own a box, the juvenile budget, filled with fables, stories, or dialogues: It was […] made one of the evening amusements of the family to rummage the budget, as their phrase was. 20he stories pulled out by the children are then read aloud and discussed by the family.
The budget is, importantly, a 'miscellany': it places different stories and dialogues alongside one another, 'in the promiscuous order in which they came to hand'.The family provides the regulated environment in which they will be read, 'as the parents thought proper'. 21rough various literary enterprises, Aikin was thus attempting to continue the earlier ideals of companionable education he and his sister had experienced at Warrington.Literary exchange also allows him to escape some of the difficulties entailed in putting these ideals into practice.There were, after all, considerable domestic and idealistic tensions within the Warrington Academy itself.Its familial structure meant that there were 'no real sanctions against bad behaviour', and the students often behaved rowdily and uncontrollably: they were, in the words of Gilbert Wakefield, 'a set of wild and reckless boys'. 22And these anxieties over 'wild and reckless' behaviour were also felt within Dissenting communities and friendships: Jon Mee has explored the ways in which the polite, accommodating Enfield acted as a kind of mediator between the overtly radical Priestley and the more conciliatory Barbauld during her Warrington years. 23Anne Janowitz, similarly, has subtly teased out the different models of sociability and thinking about Dissent at work within the Aikin milieu, arguing that 'two models of sociability' were at work within Barbauld's own career, as she shifted from an early Warringtonian emphasis on amiable friendship to 'a more urban and militant notion of sociability' during her later London years. 24literary enterprise, on the other hand, allows different, perhaps competing, models of reading and sociability to co-exist.One of the ways in which the Monthly achieves this is through Aikin's insistence on the journal as a 'Miscellany'.As we have already seen, this term looks back to earlier eighteenth-century journals, but it also, we can now understand, one which carried particular resonance for Aikin, recalling the Juvenile Budget.A Monthly editor's note comments in 1796, 'in a Miscellany of this kind…much variety is necessary', and, within a framework of emphasis on sympathetic response, multiple topics are introduced, and brought into dialogue with one another.Thus, the first issue of March 1796 opens with some minute observations on the weather during 1795, immediately followed by an article by Enfield, 'The Enquirer', asking: 'Ought the Freedom of Enquiry to be restricted?', and urging that It is only by contemplating objects in their mutual actions and relations, either by actual observation, or through the report of others, that those general conclusions can be drawn, which constitute knowledge. 25he Monthly aims to allow its readers to contemplate 'objects in their mutual actions and relations' within its own pages.Embedded in the midst of natural observations, agricultural reports and news of patents taken out for 'for a new method of tanning, the essence of which consists in using mineral instead of vegetable astringents', we have poems which celebrate education, friendship and practical benevolence at work. 26In that first issue alone, the reader might turn in a few pages from an engraving of Herschel's 'Sixty-Foot Reflecting Telescope' to an 'Ode to Science' by George Dyer, rejoicing that: […] Science open spreads her volume fair, And Friendship waves her hand. 27imilarly, an extract from Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, focussing on the mercy shown by the Prince of Denmark to prisoners, finds a response within the issue by Erasmus Darwin's poem, 'Idyllium.The Prison', which pictures imprisoned debtors celebrating the benevolence of John Howard, the prison-reformer: For us some brighter hours may flow; Some angel break these bolts of steel, For HOWARD marks, and feels our woe. 28he ethos of sympathetic response encouraged in these pieces is actively reinforced by the type of reading demanded by the magazine itself: its miscellaneous nature and its demand for readers to supply a variety of material encouraged active connection and participation.(ll.43-48) 29 Reading it in the Monthly, the extent to which it is participating in a wider Dissenting debate about the nature of retreat also becomes clear: it not only picks up Darwin's allusion to Howard in his poem 'Idyllium' from the first issue, but also continues a debate raised by Enfield in his Enquirer article for May 1796.Asking 'Is Private Affection Inconsistent with Universal Benevolence?',Enfield asserted that the 'private relations' of friendship might actively lead to universal benevolence.In a parallel movement, retirement might function not as retreat but as a prelude to wider social action, a turn which has been analysed very usefully by Kelvin Everest in the context of late eighteenth century poetry and Coleridge's conversation poems. 30Jon Mee, building on the work of Everest, has agreed that, on one level, the poem 'looks like a classic statement of the dialectic of retirement and social action in Akenside', and as such fits in very well to the debate in the pages of the Monthly. 31Retirement, within the blessed space of the cottage and the relationship with Sara, allows Coleridge to understand the idea of universal benevolence and to ready himself to put it into practice.'Such at least is the poem's 'plot',' comments Mee, but he goes on to point out that 'the 'writing' contains currents that cut across and perhaps disable this course.' 32Similarly, Everest notes some 'serious lapses of style', including 'a strident, almost hysterical quality' as the poem moves out into a wider sphere of social commitment. 33The temptation of the 'rose-leaf beds', and the yearning toward the pleasure of a solitary life, works against the ambivalent presentation of active social benevolence outside, and the poem ends with a wistful glance back toward the The publication of the poems in the Monthly further elides the distinction between public and private, reader and writer in the periodical.Both poems refer to private meetings, and both circulated privately, within a tight circle of friends, before their publication in the Monthly.Lamb's was first written as part of a letter to Coleridge; Barbauld's circulated in manuscript, in her friend Susannah Estlin's hand, for two years prior to its appearance.Publication in the Monthly, then, not only publicises their friendship with Coleridge: it opens up private celebrations of sociability, and private reading and writing exchanges, to the wider circle of the periodical readership.In one sense, then, the Monthly might then be seen as offering a way through the pitfalls of personal affection, the 'rose-leaf beds' of private, selfindulgent feeling, by extending the family or friendship network to embrace the unknown reader.This anonymous reader is, by implication, invited to participate in a similar movement of sympathy, directed toward both poet and subject.On the other hand, however, publication of these poems makes them into self-conscious performances or representations of sympathy: a point which, as we will see, is brought sharply into focus with the publication of parodic sonnets by Coleridge and others.

II
Furthermore, these assertions of sympathy were sometimes undermined from within, as an exchange of poems between Aikin and Wakefield shows.Several poems were published in the Monthly offering reassurance and support following Wakefield's imprisonment for the 1798 pamphlet A Reply to Some Parts of the Bishop of Llandaff's Address.The issue had especial significance for the Monthly because, as noted, Johnson had also been imprisoned for selling copies of Wakefield's pamphlet.
During his time in jail, Wakefield had published several translations of Horace's Epistles, with their stoic appeal for 'compos'd affections' and 'fix'd resolve' in the Monthly. 35On his release in 1801, John Aikin published a poem of support to him in its pages, offering Wakefield the 'healing balm' of 'social friendship and domestic love'. 36Private affection and retreat function here not as complement or prelude to social action, but as an alternative to overt political activity.Wakefield's political activism and desire for reform is presented as a 'generous, hopeless aim'; he should instead turn to the Muse, and to retired study: The tranquil blessings that thy lot affords, And in the soothing voice of friendship drown The groans, and shouts, and triumphs of the world. 37here are, however, tensions within these exchanges.Wakefield's reply to the poem, while it responds to Aikin's 'sympathysing friendship', rejects this particular kind of defeatist consolation. 38Wakefield's Muse, as Michael Scrivener comments, has become politicized as a defiant, resistant force: 'Terse, uncorrupt, ingenuous, bold and free'. 39Friendship is a 'medicinal influence' which will enable him to re-enter the fray: Oh! may thy friend, as in the noon of life, Responsive to the calls of truth and Man, Self in benevolence absorb'd and lost, Thro' the short remnant of his closing day.With brave defiance, or with calm disdain, Front the grim visage of despotic power. 40akefield might have felt the irony of being urged, in effect, to continue the confinement and retreat his prison sentence had enforced.The exchange, which, like the poems of Lamb and Barbauld, opens up a private friendship to the readership of the Monthly, also shows the limitations of friendly or sympathetic advice.Here, perhaps, the reader is invited not to participate, but to take sides.
Although the pattern of exchange and response within the periodical continues, the shifting political climate at the close of the eighteenth century means its emphasis has changed.Whereas Lamb and Barbauld promised support and friendship in the context of direct political action, Aikin's friendship acts as consolation in retreat, which Wakefield publicly, though politely, rejects.So, while poetic sympathy remains consistently important as part of the radical stance of the Monthly, the focus of that radicalism shifts considerably across period and between contributors -it is subjected to questioning and interrogation within the magazine itself.
The tension between retreat and engagement runs alongside negotiations between private affection and universal benevolence, and both, to return to my introductory point, might profitably be put alongside the tensions between the individual voice of the author and the collective identity of the periodical.In Coleridge's poem the desire to participate in the wider community runs alongside and is at points undercut by a yearning back toward the secluded cottage, his existence as an individual.Although adopting an opposing attitude to retreat, Wakefield's response to Aikin nevertheless repeats this pattern of difference; while it responds warmly to Aikin's enfolding, soothing friendship, the poem goes on to put forward a quite different vision of Wakefield's future self, 'in benevolence absorb'd and lost.'Even as they participate in a highly successful collective enterprise, individual contributors seek to register this individuality: to signal their difference, disagreement and conflict.III Parodic Questions I want, finally, to turn to Coleridge's parodic 'Sonnets attempted in the manner of "Contemporary Writers"', published in the Monthly for November 1797.Reading the sonnets afresh in the context of the Monthly gives a different sense of their significance, which should seen as not purely literary but also in terms of the periodical context.Moreover, the parodic voice itself unsettles concepts of authorial identity and individuality; its relationship with the voice of the periodical raises especially interesting questions.
There are three sonnets in all, which first appeared in the 'Original Poetry' section for the month, above the name of Nehemiah Higginbottom.They are usually read through the lens of literary biography, in the context not of the Monthly Magazine but of Coleridge's early friendships and poetic collaborations with Lloyd, Lamb, and Southey: all four friends were, at the time, active contributors to the Monthly.Certainly this is the perspective encouraged by Coleridge himself, when, looking back in Biographia Literaria, he claims that his intention was 'to raise a good-natured laugh' at their youthful over-enthusiasm. 41The lolloping assonance of that pseudonym is comic in itself, reminding us of the earlier disguise adopted by Coleridge, when he joined the dragoons as the clumsy cumber-backed horseman Silas Tomkyn Comberbache.This bathos is reinforced by the gleeful parody of the sonnets, with their pedantic over-determination, hyperbolic exclamations, and gothic tropes of night-time, guilt and sorrow.
The first portrays a tearfully excessive response to landscape: Pensive, at eve, on the hard world I mus'd, And my poor heart was sad: so at the moon I gaz'd -and sigh'd, and sigh'd!-for, ah! how soon Eve darkens into night.Mine eye perus'd With tearful vacancy, the dampy grass… 42 The central image of the musing evening poet was familiar from a number of poems already published by the Monthly, notably the overblown poem contributed by Robert Southey to the March 1797 issue, 'To Night': Be it mine to quit the throng, And list nightingale's sad song; Till wandering silent on and slow, Despair may soften into woe! 43hat despair softening into woe mirrored by Coleridge's eve darkening into night.
Coleridge's scornfully italicised adjectives -'dampy', 'paly' -were a favourite technique of his protégé and sometime tutee, Charles Lloyd; they had also been used by numerous other Monthly poets.A piece which seems to form a companion and answer to Southey the following month, 'A Night Scene', for example, uses the image of 'misty moonlight, paly gleam'. 44 the second, Coleridge attacks the 'meek simplicity' of contemporary poets.
It is hard not to read another attack on Charles Lloyd, scion of the Lloyd banking family, into the characterisation of Nehemiah Higginbottom as ambling 'on Lady Fortune's gentlest pad', yet perplexed by 'each small distress': So sad I am! -but should a friend and I Grow cool and miff, O! I am very sad!And then with sonnets and with sympathy My dreamy bosom's mystic woes I pall; Now of my false friend plaining plaintively, Now raving at mankind in general.This forms, as Gurion Taussig has shown, a direct parallel with a manuscript poem of friendship 'To Coleridge', written by Lloyd; it therefore has a pointed personal meaning. 45Furthermore, the attack on 'simplicity', and Coleridge's use of the words 'simple' and 'plaintively', as has been noted by Lucy Newlyn and David Erdman, among others, look back to Southey's poem 'Hannah, A Plaintive Tale', which contains the phrase 'It was a very plain and simple tale'. 46The attack was made all the more pointed because 'Hannah' had been published in the Monthly for September Lend me thy wing then, tenant of these shades!Lend me thy wing […] Oh! kindly guide me to a cave of night, So wild, so very secret, so unknown. 47ut these invocations of the poetic importance of sympathy are, in the parodic sonnets, compromised by Nehemiah Higginbottom's voice of reedy complaint, and undermined all the while by the incessant squeaking of the rats in the third sonnet, 'On a Ruined House in a Romantic Country': And this reft house is that, the which he built, Lamented Jack!And here his malt he pil'd Cautious in vain!These rats, that squeak so wild Squeak, not unconscious of their father's guilt.The humour of the nursery rhyme transformed into bathetically swelling sonnet did little to placate Coleridge's former collaborators; Southey was particularly aggrieved, reading the parodies alongside the attacks of the Anti-Jacobin as a straightforward betrayal.Certainly the parodies allowed Coleridge to distance himself, selfdeprecatingly and evasively, from a sentimental ideal of creative sympathy fostered by his own early works, collaborations and relationships.By late 1797, Coleridge was outgrowing his early style of sensibility, just as he was beginning to find the friendship of Southey, Lloyd, and, to some extent, Lamb, frustrating and cloying.
Moving toward a new friendship with Wordsworth, he was also moving toward a new style of writing, using parody of himself and others as a means of transition and distraction: as Graeme Stones has commented, 'Coleridge's pre-emptive or diversionary self-parody is mesmerisingly effective'. 48This mesmerising Coleridgean quality, combined with the absorbing story of literary friendship and literary influence these sonnets present, has distracted attention away from the equally important story of the press, the significance of their periodical context.The literary implications of the poems are clearly significant, but what of the implications of his choosing to publish the parodies in the Monthly?I have shown in the previous section how the anxieties and tensions of Coleridge's 'Reflections on Entering into Active Life' are echoed by other poetic exchanges in the pages of the Monthly, so that they may be read simultaneously as an expression of individual anxieties and in terms of a wider ongoing and evolving debate in the periodical itself.The same doubleness applies to the parodies, which should be read in the context of other contributions to the Monthly.Even the name of the 'poet' carries significance for Dissenting readers: the Nehemiah of the Old Testament, who rebuilt Jerusalem, was frequently invoked by Puritans, and the name remained in use in older Dissenting communities. 49Similarly 'Higginbottom' recalls the kinds of names which appeared in the Monthly's lengthy 'Provincial Occurrences' pages, listing marriages, births, deaths, mortifications of the bowels and dropsies. 50ylistically, the sonnets not only parody the poems of Southey, Lamb, and Lloyd, but The sufferers of the earth perhaps may go, Released by death -to thy benignant sphere, And the sad children of despair and woe Forget, in thee, their cup of sorrow here.
Oh! that I soon may reach thy world serene, Poor wearied pilgrim -in this toiling scene! 52he way in which the language of sensibility collides with the uncompromisingly urban intrusions of beer and gin and fish-men in the parodic sonnet provides a nice parallel with the similar incongruities of Coleridge's nursery rhyme of sensibility, 'Lamented Jack.'In both it is the comic transposition of the meditative mood which fuels the humour; especially interesting when both appear in the context of 'Original Poetry' pages which do use the mode of sensibility and meditation seriously.The Smith parody appeared alongside a poem by Fanny Holcroft against slavery, and several sonnets celebrating natural response, one, in very Smith-like tones, particularly calling attention to 'twilight's sombrous tints'. 53Moreover, Coleridge had every reason to be reading the poetry pages for October 1797 carefully: they also included Southey's 'Hannah, A Plaintive Tale' and the two poems of friendship by Charles Lamb.The main clue to the date of composition of the Nehemiah Higginbottom sonnets is a letter from Coleridge to his publisher Joseph Cottle dated November 20 1797, which tells him that he has 'sent three mock Sonnets in ridicule of my own, & Charles Lloyd's, and Lamb's, &c.&c.', presumably recently, and very probably -since Southey clearly thought that 'Hannah' was a target -after reading the October edition of the Monthly. 54Reading the Smith parody and the Nehemiah Higginbottom sonnets alongside one another allows us to see the Coleridge poems functioning on two levels.They not only reflect his response to his literary friendships but also his response to the press, to the periodical context, which may well have had a formative influence on the whole idea of the parodies.
On first reading, both the Smith parody and the Higginbottom sonnets seem to mock the very ethos of sympathetic response proffered by other contributors.Both suggest that the sonnet's mode of meditative introspection might be dangerously close to self-absorption, or self-importance, a selective blindness.The lively, racy Smith parody, for example, seems to revolve around the incapacity of the meditative sonnet to confront reality.The 'doleful egotism' Smith herself defended her poetry against is here turned to comic effect as the would-be sonneteer of sensibility flees his raucous subject.Similarly, Coleridge's egotistic sonneteer is unable actually to engage with the focus of his meditation, the emotions of his subjects: And I did pause me on my lonely way, And mus'd me on those wretched ones, who pass O'er the black heath of SORROW.But, alas!Most of MYSELF I thought… 55 Moreover, there is a gendered, and a sexualised, aspect to both parodies.The femininity of Smith's original sonnet, underlined by the accompanying illustration (see picture), is crudely re-read by J.Z., who turns the pictured slender figure into a 'squab form', a lusty, gin-drinking virago, whose activities with the fish-men humorously point up the slim line between sensibility and sexuality.The slippage between the two also affects Coleridge's 'Lamented Jack', whose emotional selfexposure has a bawdy physical counterpart: And thro' those brogues, still tatter'd and betorn, His hindward charms gleam an unearthly white; As when thro' broken clouds at night's high noon Peeps in fair fragments forth the full-orb'd harvest-moon! 56oth these improper interpretations of the self-exposing nature of the sonnet of sensibility demonstrate the parodists' keen awareness of the difficulties of opening the private up to the public gaze; a negotiation which, as Sarah Zimmerman has demonstrated, Smith managed extremely successfully. 57Paradoxically, the success of her appeal to her audience rested on her apparent disregard for the reader.Turning away from the public gaze, as does the female figure illustrating 'Queen of the Silver Bow', Smith invoked a personally interested sympathy from her readers, who, as the Monthly itself commented in 1807, identified with the poet against 'the idle remarks of the stupid, the unfeeling, or the envious'. 58Parodying Smith, and sonneteers in her tradition, is a way of exploiting that success.Both these parodies show how the language and the stance of sensibility might be reinterpreted and renegotiated to appeal to readers in the format of the periodical; manipulating Smith's own strategies of appealing to her audience and working to create a new kind of intimacy with the reader through humour.The parodies at once acknowledge the power of the sonnetthe mode of meditative, private retreat, the performance of intimacy -and simultaneously push against its boundaries, opening it up for questioning.
In terms of the periodical, the questioning, challenging stance of these parodic sonnets functions on two levels.Firstly, it shows us how, even whilst publishing in the 'Original Poetry' pages of the Monthly, an individual author might want to distinguish himself from its collective voice, to mark out difference.Like the poetic debates over retreat and social engagement, this reminds us quite how difficult and insecure any attempt at establishing the 'transauthorial' might be.In a larger sense, the parodic sonnets also return us to those ongoing debates in the pages of the

Poetic
Exchange and Response within the 'Monthly Magazine' This diverse and lively context of exchange and cross-fertilisation is reflected and furthered by the poems included in the Monthly, such as Coleridge's 'Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement', or, as it appears in the Monthly Magazine for October 1796, 'Reflections on Entering into Active Life.A Poem which affects not to be POETRY'.The poem itself contains a debate, as Coleridge oscillates between private poetic musing with Sara, and active work in the public sphere, amongst the 'unnumber'd Brethren': Ah quiet Dell! dear Cot! and mount sublime!I was constrain'd to quit you.Was it right, While my unnumber'd Brethren toil'd and bled, That I should dream away the trusted hours On rose-leaf beds, pamp'ring the coward heart With feelings all too delicate for use?Sweet is the tear, that from some HOWARD'S eye Drops on the cheek of one he lifts from earth.
cottage:Yet oft when after honourable toil Rests the tir'd mind, and waking loves to dream, My spirit shall revisit thee, dear cot!These divisions and contradictions were obviously perceived by contemporary readers of the Monthly, who worked to reassure Coleridge and to strengthen his resolve.The anxieties raised by Coleridge's poem are answered by a contributor to the Monthly for January 1797, Charles Lamb, in his poem 'Lines Addressed, from London, to SARA and S.T.C. at Bristol, in the Summer of 1796.'This uses a quotation from Coleridge's own 'Monody on Chatterton' to act as a sign of his faith in Coleridge's ability to go forward and fulfil an active role: Complaint, be gone!and, ominous thoughts, away!Take up, my Song, take up a merrier strain; For yet again, and lo! from Avon's vales, Another Minstrel cometh.Youth endear'd, God and good angels guide thee on thy road, And gentler fortunes 'wait the friends I love! 34One poem answers the other: the Monthly Magazine is being used as an extension of existing friendship, in an attempt to address and to answer Coleridge's preoccupations within a wider sympathetic context.The movement of sympathy continues with Anna Letitia Barbauld's poem 'To Mr S.T. Coleridge', published in the Monthly in April 1799.Its use of the phrase 'fairy bowers entranced', and the emphasis it places on the dangers of 'indolence', makes it a clear response to 'Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement', and furthers the idea of the Monthly Magazine as a medium of conversation and exchange.Like Lamb, Barbauld closes with a joyful reiteration of her confidence in Coleridge's power to engage in 'active scenes'.What is more, he is publicly assured that his writing will find a sympathetic audience; both Lamb and Felicity James, Writing in Dissent: Coleridge and the Poetry of the Monthly Magazine, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 3 (2006) www.19.bbk.ac.ukBarbauld use the term 'beloved' to symbolise and to perform their emotional and literary support for Coleridge.
Take serene Felicity James, Writing in Dissent: Coleridge and the Poetry of the Monthly Magazine, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 3 (2006) www.19.bbk.ac.uk the reference to the consolatory power of 'sonnets and sympathy' parodies the context of sympathetic response nurtured in the Monthly through such poems as Lamb's 'Lines Addressed, from London, to SARA and S.T.C.'.In the months before the Nehemiah Higginbottom poems appeared, both Lamb and Lloyd had published sonnets in the Monthly which appealed to the elusive ideal of sympathy.Two poems celebrating the joys of friendship by Charles Lamb, Felicity James, Writing in Dissent: Coleridge and the Poetry of the Monthly Magazine, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 3 (2006) www.19.bbk.ac.uk 'Sonnet to a Friend' (Charles Lloyd), and 'To a Friend' (his sister Mary), had been published in October 1797.In August, Lloyd's 'To a Wood-Pigeon' had appeared, which features the young Lloyd imploring the pigeon, somewhat implausibly, to 'lend me thy wing': also closely follow other examples in the Monthly such as a 'PARODY OF THE FOURTH SONNET OF MRS. C. SMITH' published under the initials J.Z. the previous month: 'Queen of the Silver Bow' &c.ADDRESSED TO A FISH-WOMAN QUEEN of the silver Thames, on thy squab form, And face empurpl'd, I delight to gaze; And watch th'impetuous, unresisted storm -The rising clamour of thy tongue betrays.And, while I look, thy fiercely-glancing eye Sheds fearful bodings on my troubled breast; And oft I think, if thou alone wast by, In all thy terrors clad, I could not rest.The Fishmen of the Thames perhaps delight, Deep drenched in beer, to fold thee in their arms, And treat with gin, and pass the live-long night, In glad forgetfulness of day's alarms.Oh, sable goddess!May thy threat'ning mien Ne'er light on me by Thames's crouded scene. 51This directly caricatures the introspection of the Smith sonnet, 'To the Moon', from her very popular Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poems, which had emerged in a new edition in 1797: Queen of the silver bow! -by thy pale beam, Alone and pensive, I delight to stray, And watch thy shadow trembling in the stream, Or mark the floating clouds that cross thy way.And while I gaze, thy mild and placid light Sheds a soft calm upon my troubled breast; And oft I think -fair planet of the night, That in thy orb, the wretched may have rest: kind of reader Coleridge was hoping to attract with The Watchman.Like Johnson and Phillips, he had his eye on the large body of liberal Dissenters in places like Derby Bristol, the Watchman is read for it's original matter, & the News & Debates barely tolerated: the people [at] Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham &c take [it only] as a Newspaper, & regard the Essays and Poems as [in]truders unwished for and unwelcomed.