Sara Coleridge Writing for the Quarterly Review

Abstract

In 1848 SC wrote two long reviews for the Quarterly Review. The first, on Tennyson’s The Princess, was published in the March 1848 issue (vol. 82, pp. 427–53). The second, on two collected editions of Beaumont and Fletcher, followed in September 1848 (vol. 83, pp. 377–418). As SC said in a letter to Mrs Townsend, she was in some respects not intellectually suited to writing reviews: “I am carried away by my subject, and cannot help going too deep into it and travelling too widely all about it.”* She had great difficulty in keeping to a reasonable length, and both articles were shortened. In the case of the Tennyson review, this was at least partly for reasons of literary politics, as SC complained, with the Quarterly of the 1840s continuing the hostility toward the “Cockney” poet Keats expressed in J. W. Croker’s notorious review of Endymion in 1818 (Quarterly Review 19 April 1818, pp. 204–208); even such judicious and qualified praise of Keats as as SC included in her article was unwelcome in the pages of the Quarterly Review. The extracts in this section include some of the phrases and passages that Lockhart cut from her manuscript; these are printed in square brackets in italic script. Even more offensively, Lockhart added some misogynistic passages and phrases of his own (see the footnote on p. 108, for instance).