Coleridge's use of Laudanum and Opium: As Connected with his Interest in Contemporary Investigations Concerning Stimulation and Sensation

In the year 1847, Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, a book written and edited by Joseph Cottle, printer and publisher, and generous friend of Coleridge, created a tremendous furor. Cottle was then making much of what he called Coleridge's “full and voluntary confession of the sins he had committed against ‘himself, his friends, his children, and his God.’“(1) Dramatically sensational is Cottle's expression of his fear that concealment of that most remarkable letter, that “most redeeming letter Samuel Taylor Coleridge ever penned,” (2) in which he speaks of his crime of opium, “would have been injustice to the living, and treachery to the dead.” (3) This book, however, described by one writer as being “full of vanity and foolishness, and in some ways little less than an outrage,” (4) is no longer the only source, though it was one of the first sources, of information about Coleridge. Cottle's statements and interpretations have been found to have been quite often inaccurate, as inaccurate as were many of Coleridge's own reminiscences. Alois Brandl, in his book, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the English Romantic School, which came out in 1887, called it one of Coleridge's “many defects of memory in worldly things,” (5) when the poet spoke of his resorting to opium as a mode of relief adopted “from a prescription in some quack book, without considering how easily such a habit could be contracted.” (6) Though the editor of the Watchman, according to Brandl, “knew well the danger of ‘bad habits,’“(7) he, like so many of his high-principled contemporaries, “fell a victim to mistaken advice,” (8) medical advice given by the famous Dr. Beddoes. Brandl objected to the customary habit, prevalent up to that time, of speaking “of the opium-eating to which Coleridge and others of his time fell victims, with moral condemnation, as if it had been a sin and not an illness;