on atheism, immortality, and kindred topics prompted Coleridge to suggest that a delightful and instructive essay might be written on the Latitudinarian Party at Cambridge from the close of James I's reign to the latter half of Charles II's reign. In his note Coleridge likewise characterized the principal members of the party according to their philosophical affiliations.

Sotheby's on April 12, 1907, sold one of the most interesting items of Coleridge marginalia. When Southey published his Life of Wesley (2 vols., 1820), he gave a presentation copy to his gifted brotherin-law. Coleridge rejoiced in it and called it "my darling book and the favorite of my library." During the ensuing years he enriched the two volumes with copious annotations, many of which were printed in later editions of the Life of Wesley. That all of the comments were not favorable may be inferred from the following significant note on the fly-leaf of the first volume: "Memento! It is my desire and request that this work should be presented to its Donor and Author, Robert Southey, after my Death. The substance and character of the marginal annotations will abundantly prove the absence of any such intention in my mind, at the time they were written. But it will not be uninteresting to him to know that the one or the other volume was the book more often in my hands than any other in my ragged Book regiment."

In conclusion we may refer to a volume that links the author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner with the greatest of the Victorian poets. Coleridge's race was nearly run when Tennyson's volumes of 1830 and 1833 appeared. In his Table Talk (April 24, 1833), he criticized Tennyson's lack of understanding of English meter and was probably referring to the 1833 volume, which had appeared in December, 1832. Perhaps at some earlier time he had come across a copy of Poems Chiefly Lyrical (1830), which Tennyson had presented to a lady with the inscription, "Jane Tonge, from her unworthy friend the Author." Coleridge asterisked the word “unworthy" and added the somewhat pointed comment: "No imputation is here cast on the judgement of the said Jane Tonge in the choice of a friend: nor is there any lurking allusion to the well-known adage, 'Great minds will descend.' Condescension is not descension. -'the blue heaven bends over all.' S. T. C." This interesting volume was sold at Sotheby's on July 15, 1914.

In these brief notes on Coleridge's marginalia enough has been

revealed to show why S. T. C. has so small a following and why there is no general demand for a definitive edition of his complete works. His own grandson, Ernest Hartley Coleridge, who died as recently as 1920, did not even carry out his project to prepare an adequate biography of his illustrious grand father. Coleridge was a man of the widest intellectual range. Few scholars of our own day are equipped to follow him in all the fields of his interest. His preparation for the synthesis of his scheme of philosophy was profound and comprehensive in the extreme, but as in the case of his poetry, his performance was fragmentary, disjointed, and largely ineffectual. Our age is one that has little time to meditate over nuggets of wisdom to be found in random table-talk, literary ana, or marginal commentary. Perhaps in that statement we may have the basic reason for the bibliophile's comparative neglect of the volumes containing S. T. C.'s illuminating marginalia.

TH

DICKENS, DAVID COPPerfield, aND

THOMAS HOLCROFT

PAUL C. KITCHEN

Assistant Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

HE autobiographical element in David Copperfield has been extensively emphasized. So much, indeed, has been said about this aspect of the story that it requires some resolution to accept the thought that Dickens' imagination was furnished, although in a slight degree, by what another man had written of himself, as well as by the incidents and people of his own association. But Forster, the intimate friend and authoritative biographer, says that "too much has been assumed, from those revelations, of a full identity of Dickens with his hero,"1 and inclines one toward another point of view. Reflecting upon this statement, one may admit that Dickens found matter for the novel in the experience of another that closely resembled his own, and that his imagination dwelling upon the Memoirs of Thomas Holcroft, found the latter's revelations of childhood germane to his purpose. Two questions naturally arise: What did he find there? And how did he adapt what he found to the demands of the novel? The answers to these questions lie in certain comparisons of the two books.

The Memoirs of Thomas Holcroft is a chronicle of the uses of adversity. "By home," he writes, "I mean an old house half in ruins, about two miles on the north-east side of Rugeley, with a kitchen-garden, paddock, and croft, which afforded some scanty supplies to man and beast, when my father found it convenient, or thought proper, to rest a little from his labours; but to me this house often became a den of misery. I was not yet nine years old, but I had a variety of employments." How similar the situation here

3

1Forster's Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. III, Chap. I.

"Memoirs of Thomas Holcroft, London, 1814. Quotations in the present paper are from a later edition, London, 1852.

3 Holcroft, p. 21.

pictured was to that in which Dickens found himself in childhood, may be seen from his biography:

It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age. It is wonderful to me that, even after my descent into the poor little drudge I had been since we came to London, no one had compassion enough on me-a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally-to suggest that something might have been spared, as certainly it might have been, to place me at any common school. Our friends, I take it, were tired out. No one made any sign. My father and mother were quite satisfied. They could hardly have been more so if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a grammar-school, and going to Cambridge.1

Holcroft's father was a tramping pedlar, while the elder Dickens was a clerk in the Navy pay office; but in goods and possessions, they were the terms of a neatly balanced equation.

Dickens was well aware of this likeness in type of experience. In 1846, he wrote to Forster in reference to his own autobiography: "Shall I leave you my life in MS. when I die? There are some things in it that would touch you very much, and that might go on the same shelf with the first volume of Holcroft's." 2 As boys, moreover, Dickens and Holcroft were alike in spirit. Each suffered because of the sordidness of his associations and environment; each sought an education, and expressed his longings in reading so far as he was able; each was industrious, conscientious, and dependable; and each succeeded, climbing out of the mire of his early surroundings to a position not only of respectability but of eminence, the one a playwright, the other a novelist.

Whatever intention Dickens may have had of setting down an extended record of his life, was not, however, carried out, and he chose to unite fact with fancy in the pages of David Copperfield. I have seen the suggestion that the following paragraph from Holcroft might be regarded as a description of Mr. Micawber: "Having been bred to an employment for which he was very ill-fitted, both from his physical and mental powers and propensities, the habit that became most rooted in, and most fatal to my father, was a fickleness of disposition, a thorough persuasion, after he had tried one means of providing for himself and family for a certain time, that he had discovered another far more profitable and secure. Steadiness of 1 Forster, Vol. I, Chap. II.

Forster, Vol. II, Chap. XVI.

pursuit was a virtue at which he could never arrive; and I believe few men in the kingdom had in the course of their lives been the hucksters of so many small wares; or more enterprising dealers in articles of a half-penny value." Certainly if this were all, we should have little of Mr. Micawber, and we know that the grandiloquent flourish of speech which so endears him to the reader, came from Dickens' own father; but there are here certain elements suggestive of Mr. Micawber's obvious faults. Might not his instability have come partly from this source? And surely the following statement does well describe the Micawber character in the midst of untoward circumstances: "How fortunate for me in this respect that I had such a father! He was driven by extreme poverty, restless anxiety, and a brain too prone to sanguine expectation, into many absurdities, which were but the harbingers of fresh misfortunes: but he had as much integrity and honesty of heart as perhaps any man in the kingdom, who had had no greater advantages." 2 How similar these sentiments are to those entertained by Dickens for his own father is seen in the following sentences: "I know my father to be as kind-hearted and generous a man as ever lived in the world. Everything that I can remember of his conduct to his wife, or children, or friends, in sickness or affliction, is beyond all praise.' Two quotations from the novel will show the development of the idea the germ of which is contained in the above paragraph from the Memoirs: "You find us, Copperfield,' said Mr. Micawber, with one eye on Traddles, 'at present established, on what may be designated as a small and unassuming scale; but, you are aware that I have, in the course of my career, surmounted difficulties, and conquered obstacles. You are no stranger to the fact, that there have been periods of my life, when it has been requisite that I should pause, until certain expected events should turn up; when it has been necessary that I should fall back, before making what I trust I shall not be accused of presumption in terming-a spring. The present is one of those momentous stages in the life of man. You find me, fallen back, for a spring; and I have every reason to believe that a vigorous leap will shortly be the result.'" And a little later on we encounter the statement: "I am at present, my dear Copperfield,

1 Holcroft, p. 19.

'Holcroft, p. 15; cf. Holcroft, Chap. XVI: "I loved my father," etc. 'Forster, Vol. I, Chap. I.

David Copperfield, Chap. XXVII.

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