Autograph letter signed ('S.T. Coleridge') to Dr Sainsbury, Calne, 'Thursday', n.d. [1815]

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
Autograph letter signed ('S.T. Coleridge') to Dr Sainsbury, Calne, 'Thursday', n.d. [1815]
3½ pages, 198 x 163mm, integral address panel to Sainsbury at Corsham. Provenance: Sotheby's, 6 March 1939, lot 172; 'The Property of A Gentleman', Christie's New York, 19 December 1986, lot 52.

'Wounded by the frequent assertions – "all his complaints are owing to the use of opium"'. On his health, his opium addiction and his outrage at criticism of Walter Scott in the Edinburgh Review. Coleridge complains of the heat, which is making him ill, and had delayed writing because of this and because he was awaiting a visit from his old school-fellow John Gutch, 'who has most disinterestedly undertaken my work [the Biographia Literaria] at the prime Cost to himself'. Gutch's visit has been delayed by the illness of his wife, a bilious disease for which she has been taking Calomel (a mercury compound), although Coleridge has been advising her to reduce the dosage ('I am convinced, that the Theory of minute Doses as possessing not proportional but sui-generis power, has not yet been fairly tried'). Gutch will now come with his convalescent wife, and Coleridge's visit to Sainsbury may be envisaged after they have departed. He comments unfavourably on a recent critical article about Walter Scott's Don Roderick in the Edinburgh Review: 'the fiendish disposition, shewn on the first page, is shocking to me ... it is not with the severity of their criticism that I am offended – just criticism (and to be just it must be impersonal) is to me never severe'. The letter concludes with a remarkable passage on his physical complaints and his laudanum addiction, which he hopes to discuss with Sainsbury when they meet.

The extraordinary Heat of the Weather and of this Garret, (the only room I have to study in, and which it were scarcely exaggeration to call an Oven, so saturated with Calorie is the Air in it from the Power of the Rays beating on its roof not a foot from my head!) has almost overpowered me, and made my miserable Stomach weaker than ever ... Have you ever heard of a man, whose Hypochondriasis consisted in, a constant craving to have himself opened before his own eyes? – If my reason were to relax, this, I am certain, would be the shape that my Madness would assume. Wounded by the frequent assertions – "all his complaints are owing to the use of opium", & yet not only certain in my own mind but able to bring proofs from a series of Letters written before I had ever taken a grain of that Drug, solid or in tincture, that my Complaints in genere were antecedent to my unfortunate (but, God knows! most innocent) Resort to that Palliative, I am never in pain but I feel a strange phantom-wish working in me something to this purpose – if I could but be present while my Viscera were laid open! I am sure, than [sic] either a Thickening or some other Form of Stricture and Obstruction, would be found somewhere in the intermediate Spaces between the Stomach and the lower Guts.

Coleridge was at Calne in Wiltshire between December 1814 and March 1816, living with his friends John and Mary Morgan and Mary's sister Charlotte in a rented house. It was during this period that he dictated Biographia Literaria, which was published in 1817.