CVI. TO THE SAME.
(Early in 1800.)
My dear Southey,—I shall give up this Newspaper business; it is too, too fatiguing. I have attended the Debates twice, and the first time I was twenty-five hours in activity, and that of a very unpleasant kind; and the second time, from ten in the morning till four o’clock the next morning. I am sure that you will excuse my silence, though indeed after two such letters from you I cannot scarcely excuse it myself. First of the book business. I find a resistance which I did not expect to the anonymousness of the publication. Longman seems confident that a work on such a subject without a name would not do. Translations and perhaps Satires are, he says, the only works that booksellers now venture on without a name. He is very solicitous to have your “Thalaba,” and wonders (most wonderful!) that you do not write a novel. That would be the thing! and truly, if by no more pains than a “St. Leon”[226] requires you could get four hundred pounds!! or half the money, I say so too! If we were together we might easily toss up a novel, to be published in the name of one of us, or two, if that were all, and then christen ’em by lots. As sure as ink flows in my pen, by help of an amanuensis I could write a volume a week—and Godwin got four hundred pounds! for it—think of that, Master Brooks. I hope that some time or other you will write a novel on that subject of yours! I mean the “Rise and Progress of a Laugher”—Le Grice in your eye—the effect of Laughing on taste, manners, morals, and happiness! But as to the Jacobin Book, I must wait till I hear from you. Phillips would be very glad to engage you to write a school book for him, the History of Poetry in all nations, about 400 pages; but this, too, must have your name. He would give sixty pounds. If poor dear Burnett were with you, he might do it under your eye and with your instructions as well as you or I could do it, but it is the name. Longman remarked acutely enough, “The booksellers scarcely pretend to judge the merits of the book, but we know the saleableness of the name! and as they continue to buy most books on the calculation of a first edition of a thousand copies, they are seldom much mistaken; for the name gives them the excuse for sending it to all the Gemmen in Great Britain and the Colonies, from whom they have standing orders for new books of reputation.” This is the secret why books published by country booksellers, or by authors on their own account, so seldom succeed.
As to my schemes of residence, I am as unfixed as yourself, only that we are under the absolute necessity of fixing somewhere, and that somewhere will, I suppose, be Stowey. There are all my books and all our furniture. In May I am under a kind of engagement to go with Sara to Ottery. My family wish me to fix there, but that I must decline in the names of public liberty and individual free-agency. Elder brothers, not senior in intellect, and not sympathising in main opinions, are subjects of occasional visits; not temptations to a co-township. But if you go to Burton, Sara and I will waive the Ottery plan, if possible, and spend May and June with you, and perhaps July; but she must be settled in a house by the latter end of July, or the first week in August. Till we are with you, Sara means to spend five weeks with the Roskillies, and a week or two at Bristol, where I shall join her. She will leave London in three weeks at least, perhaps a fortnight; and I shall give up lodgings and billet myself free of expense at my friend Purkis’s, at Brentford. This is my present plan. O my dear Southey! I would to God that your health did not enforce you to migrate—we might most assuredly continue to fix a residence somewhere, which might possess a sort of centrality. Alfoxden would make two houses sufficiently divided for unimpinging independence.
Tell Davy that I have not forgotten him, because without an epilepsy I cannot forget him; and if I wrote to him as often as I think of him, Lord have mercy on his pocket!
God bless you again and again.
S. T. Coleridge.
I pass this evening with Charlotte Smith at her house.