Scope and arrangement
This is a synthetic collection that includes manuscripts, correspondence, a journal for 1798, notebooks kept for 1814 through 1832, legal documents, and a commonplace book. The manuscripts include poems, essays, lectures, notes for Greek and Latin language studies, and other holograph material by the author, as well as essays, incomplete manuscripts, and poems relating to the author by Thomas De Quincey, James Russell Lowell, Algernon Charles Swinburne and others. The correspondence includes letters, dating from 1791 to 1834, from the author to Thomas Allsop, his brother George Coleridge, his wife Sara, Joseph Cottle, John Hookham Frere, James Gillman Jr., Joseph Henry Green, J. A. Hessey, Francis Jeffrey, Thomas Poole, and others. Also present are letters relating to the author, dating from 1835 to 1894, between various correspondents including Sir Francis Legatt Chantrey, Hartley Coleridge, Joseph Henry Green, Joseph Cottle, James Gillman, Robert Southey, and John Edmund Reade. Also present is a 122-page letter-book of copies in Thomas Ward's hand, of letters to Sara Coleridge, Thomas Poole, the Rev. Roskilly, and Thomas Wedgwood. There are letters to Coleridge from Charles Lamb, Thomas Poole, Dorothy and William Wordsworth, dating from 1797 to 1829.
The Samuel Taylor Coleridge collection of papers are arranged in three series: