FOLIO NOTEBOOK

HLH MS HM 17299

COVER

Brown marbled cardboard, in good condition. There are no labels or stickers. Entries F°.1 5308, F°.2 5361, F°.3, F°.4, F°.5 (the last three to come in CN V) are on inside front cover [f1^v].

WATERMARK

EMBLEM Chain Lines

J.Coles

1823

SIZE AND CONDITION

186 leaves, not foliated by the Huntington Library. Foliation here is therefore adventitiously imposed according to the system used for the other notebooks and is marked with square brackets, including inside front and back covers which contain entries, and two leaves [ff185–186^v] that were excised. There is a sheet pasted in between [f49^v and f50] containing a copy of part of entry 5426, smudged by the cancellations in 5424, done in Mrs Gillman’s hand. Pages were numbered by Coleridge 1 to 201 from [f3] to [f103], with numbers being omitted, irregularly on many versos to f80^v, and on all versos from there to ƒ103^v. The bottom two inches of [ff54–54^v] are torn off and [f66^v] is numbered twice as 128 and 131. Numbers are usually in the upper centre of the page; 131 [f68] is in the upper right-hand corner. The [f67^v] 130 is left blank, as are [ff92–100^v] and [ff101^v–181]. Entries begin again on [f181^v] and continue to [f187]. It is not known whether [ff185–186^v] were excised before or after entries on them were entered in the notebook. Entries are in ink unless otherwise indicated. On [f101] 197 is a title, “Fly-Catcher No XX”.

PERIOD OF USE

The folio notebook appears to have been used from I November 1825 until March 1832 in normal order with a few exceptions from front to back without reversals or turning. For the most part it was used in conjunction with Notebooks 26, 33, and 34 for Coleridge’s theological and philosophical conjectures, although it contains some highly personal entries and a long autobiographical one. See 5257 for what may have been intended as a title for the whole notebook.