The Historical Development of Lyrical Ballads

by Bruce Graver

This account of the historical deveopment of Lyrical Ballads depends largely upon earlier scholarship, especially the bibliographical and editorial studies of Wells, Foxon, Healey, Reed, Butler and Green (please see the Works Cited).

When in 1798 Wordsworth and Coleridge decided to publish a volume of poems, they were not primarily thinking of ways to revolutionize English poetry. Instead, as Mark Reed has shown, they needed money for an extended trip to Germany, where William and Dorothy Wordsworth were to become fluent in German, and where Coleridge would study at German universities (Reed 1965). With this is mind, they turned to Joseph Cottle, the Bristol publisher and bookseller who had already published several volumes of Coleridge's poetry, and could be depended upon to come to the financial aid of fledgling authors. Several proposals were put forward, including a joint publication of the poets' two tragedies, Osorio and The Borderers, a single volume containing "The Ruined Cottage" and "Salisbury Plain," or "Salisbury Plain" and "Peter Bell," and even a two-volume set of Wordsworth's poetical works. But all of these proposals came to naught, and by late May of 1798, Cottle had agreed to publish a collection of ballads, including Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancyent Marinere," Wordsworth's "The Thorn" and "The Idiot Boy," as well as other poems that the two authors had ready for the press. The volume would appear anonymously—according to Coleridge, "Wordsworth's name is nothing—[and] to a large number of persons mine stinks"—and Cottle agreed to advance the poets thirty guineas as payment (Butler & Green 3-12, 43-44).

At Coleridge's insistence, typesetting began almost immediately, and the first poem to be set was "The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere." Wordsworth himself was frequently in Bristol "to superintend the printing" (Letters: Early Years 219), and the result was a remarkably well-printed volume: there were just five printer's errors corrected on an errata sheet, and a handful of others that were noticed and corrected in the printing process. By late August, the entire volume was ready for binding, and Cottle bound up a few copies apparently for private circulation. Subsequently, and perhaps because of readers' reactions, the authors made two major changes to their collection: Coleridge's poem "The Nightingale" was substituted for his "Lewti" (probably because the latter poem had already appeared in The Morning Post, and its inclusion might compromise the anonymity of Lyrical Ballads), and a brief explanatory preface, called an "Advertisement," was written and inserted just before the table of contents. A few more copies were then bound up, some of them for the poets and their friends, including Coleridge, Robert Southey, J. F. Pinney, and probably Thomas Lovell Beddoes; some of those copies were what Reed has called "archival copies," in that they included both "Lewti" and "The Nightingale" (Reed 1998). The result is that the first printing of Lyrical Ballads existed in multiple versions almost from the start. Of the fourteen surviving copies with the Bristol imprint, three contain "Lewti" and neither "The Nightingale" nor the "Advertisement," two contain "Lewti," "The Nightingale," and the "Advertisement" (one of these, Robert Southey's copy, has two different tables of contents), and nine copies contain "The Nightingale" and the "Advertisement" (Reed 1998). Of these nine, one also contains, following "The Nightingale," an extra leaf on which is printed Beddoes' "Domiciliary Verses," a poem which parodies The Lyrical Ballads. If Duncan Wu and Reed are right, this was Beddoes's own copy (Wu; Reed 1998).

At the last minute, just as the Wordsworths and Coleridge were about to leave for Germany, Cottle decided not to publish the book himself. He was concerned about his growing financial difficulties (for this reason, he quit the bookselling business the next year), and, fearing that the volume would do poorly, he began to look for a London publisher. T. N. Longman was certainly approached but just as certainly refused Cottle's offer. Wordsworth approached the prominent liberal publisher, Joseph Johnson, who had previously published An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, and Johnson agreed to assume publication. But Cottle, probably independent of Wordsworth's efforts and certainly without telling him, offered and sold the copyright to the more obscure firm of J. & A. Arch. Thus, on October 3, 1798, Wordsworth wrote from Germany that he still did not know who his publisher was, and on the next day, October 4, 1798, Lyrical Ballads finally appeared in London bookshops with a title page bearing the London imprint of J. & A. Arch (Butler & Green 14-15). It was composed entirely of sheets printed and bound for the Bristol imprint; only a new title page was added as a cancel.

In spite of its haphazard beginnings and a few hostile reviews (most notably by Robert Southey in the Critical Review and Charles Burney in the Monthly Review), the first edition of Lyrical Ballads sold reasonably well, and sales were aided in 1800 by the support of Mary Robinson in The Morning Post,and by a pair of strongly favorable notices in The British Critic and The Anti-jacobin Review (Butler & Green 23-24; Woof 172-175). In the meantime, William and Dorothy Wordsworth and Coleridge had returned to England, the Wordsworths to take up residence in Grasmere, and Coleridge, after spending a few months in London, relocated himself and his family at Greta Hall, near Keswick, a few miles up the road from the Wordsworths. Upon settling in Grasmere, Wordsworth began writing a series of new poems, most of them about places and people in the Lake District, several of which he called pastorals. Together with poems written in Germany, these gave Wordsworth a significant body of new work which he was eager to publish, and Coleridge, still residing in London, acted as his agent. Negotiations were begun with the firm of T. N. Longman for a second edition of Lyrical Ballads, and by June, 1800, Wordsworth was able to write his brother, Richard, that the first edition had sold out, and that Longman had agreed to publish a second edition, for which he would be paid £80 (Butler & Green 23-24). It was to include a second volume of new poems, and a substantial new "Preface." One poem, Wordsworth's "The Convict" was withdrawn from volume I, and in its place, Coleridge's "Love" was added.

Over the next six months, Lyrical Ballads (1800) was printed. It is, remarked George H. Healey, "bibliographically the most complex of all Wordsworth's books," and the reasons for its complexity are not far to seek (Healey 6). First, although Wordsworth and Coleridge had contracted with Longman for a new volume of poems, and although Wordsworth himself had a considerable stock of new poems already written, Coleridge's intended contributions (including Christabel and a group of poems to be set in the Lake District) were either unwritten or unfinished. Second, the Bristol firm of Biggs and Cottle was again engaged to print the volume. But this time the authors could not oversee the printing process because they were in the Lake District, hundreds of miles away. Their only means of communication with the printer was by post, and their letters sometimes took weeks to arrive. To compensate for this difficulty, they enlisted the services of the young chemist, Humphry Davy, newly famous for his studies of the effects of nitrous oxide. Davy was asked to check over the printer's manuscripts and the printed proofs, and even to add and correct punctuation. But Davy was by no means privy to the poets' intentions, and thus would not have been able to answer accurately printer's queries, nor was he especially qualified as a proofreader, and, to make matters worse, he was ill much of the autumn of 1800 and was probably not able to offer much assistance. Third, the letters containing the manuscript poems were sent over a period of several months, between late July and December, 1800, and Wordsworth revised poems that had been sent in earlier letters, changed the arrangement of the poems even after the printing process had begun, and even tried to change the title of the volume. At least one letter was lost in the mail, causing further delays. And then, in October, 1800, the poets made the most significant, and most controversial, change of all: they withdrew the longest new poem in the second volume, Coleridge's Christabel, and eventually substituted for it Wordsworth's pastoral poem, "Michael," which, at the time Christabel was withdrawn, had not yet been conceived of. As a result, Biggs and Cottle had to cancel the first printed leaf of the "Preface," which mentioned Christabel, and to delay publication of the new edition until Wordsworth had finished his 485-line poem. The delays meant that Longman could not distribute the volumes in time to take advantage of the 1800 Christmas trade, and Biggs and Cottle had to rush "Michael" through the press. Inevitably, they made a big mistake: fifteen lines of the poem, crucial to the plot, were omitted, and Wordsworth complained that the volume "is throughout miserably printed," while Coleridge fumed over "an infamous Blunder of the Printer" (Butler & Green 26-31, 123-125; Healey 6).

Besides complaining, Wordsworth was quick to send Longman corrections to "Michael". On April 9, 1801, less than three months after the volumes appeared, he advised Thomas Poole to send to Longman for a "half a sheet" containing corrections. The phrase "half a sheet" refers either to a printed paste-in which supplies the fifteen lines missing from "Michael," or to printed cancels containing both the missing lines and a new, twenty-seven-item errata leaf, which were usually bound into the second volume of Lyrical Ballads, but may have been issued separately as well. The paste-in survives in two copies, one in the Huntington Library, and the other at Swarthmore College. It is not a handsome thing: the type does not match the rest of the volume in size or font, the inner and outer edges of the paper are torn, not cut, and, in the Huntington copy, it is not even pasted in straight. John Edwin Wells, who purchased the Swarthmore copy in the 1930s, suspected that the paste-in may have been a sophistication added later by a not wholly scrupulous bookseller (Wells, Library). More recently, Butler and Green seem convinced that it represents Longman's earliest, rather crude effort to correct the printer's error (Butler & Green 126). The cancels, on the other hand, are a much more attractive, professional-looking effort. They match the paper, font, and the layout of the original volume, and replace pages 209-212 with a new set of pages, numbered 209-210, *209-*210, 211-212. The four-item errata leaf of the first printing, pages 227-[228] was also replaced, and the new errata leaf contains twenty-seven items, correcting most of the rest of the printer's errors, and offering several new readings as well (Healey 6; Butler & Green 126; Wells, PMLA). If one counts three copies that are currently unlocated, only about a dozen surviving copies of Lyrical Ballads (1800) contain the cancels (of these, one contains just the "Michael" cancels; another just the new errata leaf), which suggests that they were added only after most of the copies had been sold or distributed to other booksellers (Healey 6). In any case, what was true of the 1798 printing was also true of the edition of 1800: multiple versions circulated, as a result either of printer's errors, miscommunications between authors and printers, or the authors' own revisions. Lyrical Ballads (1800) was clearly a work in progress, even as it appeared in published form.

In fact, preparations for a new edition began almost as soon as the errors in the 1800 volumes had been corrected. Using two proof copies of the 1800 edition which contained the cancels, the Wordsworths began entering revisions and corrections , keeping one copy for themselves and eventually sending the other to Longman as printer's copy for a new edition. This process began during the summer of 1801, and was complete by April, 1802 (Butler & Green 31-32). Some of the changes were matters of formatting and presentation: the order of the poems was changed, some poems were omitted and others were moved to the second volume, and a new half-title was added after the "Preface," with an epigraph from Quintilian. Other changes were more extensive: a long section was added to the middle of the "Preface," containing the famous definition of the poet ("a man speaking to men") and the comparison of the poet and the "man of science," an "Appendix" concerning "poetic diction" was added at the end of volume I, a note to the "Ancient Mariner" was dropped, and, among the poems, "Ruth" was drastically revised. Two new poems, "Louisa" and "I travell'ed among unknown men," were initially intended to be published in the second volume of the new edition, but were later withdrawn. Drafts towards them survive in a family copy of Lyrical Ballads (1800), now at St. John's College, Cambridge, and a note about the placement of "Louisa" is included in a proof copy of Lyrical Ballads (1800) containing the revisions for 1802, now in the Beinecke Library (Curtis 196-201; Butler & Green xxxiv-xxxv).

The third edition of Lyrical Ballads appeared in June, 1802, just in time to achieve notoriety. That year the inaugural number of the Edinburgh Review was published, and in the October number, in a review of Southey's Thalaba, Francis Jeffrey began his long campaign against Wordsworth and the "Lake School" of poetry. This notoriety may have spurred Longman to market the volumes more aggressively: full-page notices, quoting liberally from favorable reviews, began to appear in Longman's advertisements in the backs of better selling works, such as Southey's edition of Chatterton (1803) and Joanna Baillie's Miscellaneous Plays (1804), and adverts for Lyrical Ballads appeared side-by-side with ones for the best-selling poem of the time, Robert Bloomfield's The Farmer's Boy. But Longman's marketing efforts seem to have had little effect : the print run of 500 copies took almost three years to sell out (Butler & Green 32)—at a time when a competing collection, Bloomfield's Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs, sold thousands of copies in less than a single year— and it was not until October 9, 1805 that the fourth and final authorized edition of Lyrical Ballads appeared.

Lyrical Ballads (1805) has historically been considered the least interesting of all the editions of the collection. Few authorial changes were made: no new poems were added, no old ones subtracted, and no new front or back matter was included. Only "Ruth" received extensive revisions, and most of those were reversions to the text of 1800. But though the authors made few significant changes to the text, a change was made by the publisher that subtly affected how the new edition would be read: Longman changed printers. Rather than the firm of Biggs and Cottle, which by 1802 had relocated to London, Longman entrusted the printing of the 1805 volumes to R. Taylor of Shoe-Lane, London. Taylor's firm imposed much more rigorous standards of spelling, capitalization, and punctuation than had been practiced by Biggs and Cottle, it used more modern type, eliminating altogether the archaic ct ligature and the long "s" and, on the whole, Taylor produced the most consistently-printed edition of Lyrical Ballads that we have. Because of this consistency, as well as the avoidance of archaic typography, the 1805 edition is also more modern in appearance: with this printing, Lyrical Ballads looks to its readers less like a quaint holdover of the late eighteenth century, and more like a fully modern book.

The 1805 Lyrical Ballads was the last authorized edition of the collection to appear. By 1815, Wordsworth's contributions had been dispersed throughout the first collected edition of his poems, and by the 1820 collection, the phrase "Lyrical Ballads" had disappeared from his title page. Coleridge, too, had republished his contributions in Sybilline Leaves (1817), the same year in which he publicly distanced himself from his collaborator's critical opinions in Biographia Literaria. Pirated editions of Lyrical Ballads, made up of leftover sheets from Longman's various print runs, appeared in 1820, at least one of which is actually a reprint of one volume of Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) (Butler & Green 32; Wells, PQ 398-402; Healey 22). But Wordsworth himself had gone on to other things: to tour poetry, sonnet sequences, and, of course, the unfinished Recluse. And so had Coleridge, bringing to an end one of the most important collaborations in the history of English poetry.

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It uncannily apt that the Lyrical Ballads, produced at a critical transition in the history of print — between coterie and mass printing, between dynastic and corporate publishing houses — should also have appeared as a digital edition in 1998, very early in the history of web publishing, only to suffer from massive medial transformations: an unprecedented evolutionary acceleration that could render a digital architecture both "new" and obsolete, almost within the space of a year or two.

One can see the original Romantic Circles publication of Lyrical Ballads via the Wayback Machine, now maintained by the Library of Congress — although it takes patience. Here, it is newly revived, expanded to include all the copies transcribed and encoded by Bruce Graver. This resurrection was made possible for one reason alone: Dr. Graver listened and adhered to the recommendations of a group of digital editors, the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium.

Most certainly, simple typed text, whether inside code or not, would survive multiple phases of web development, although ripping the text from an antiquated CD-ROM, the original format proposed by Cambridge University Press, might have required prohibitive expense. But the TEI code used by Dr. Graver, in SGML, encouraged him to record whether the insertion of a correction appears below the line or in the margin, whether it was written in Dorothy or William Wordsworth's hand. And all those editorial enrichments that the editor spent years figuring out and meticulously recording are now visible here.