Uncovering the Archive: Sara Coleridge’s Flower Fantasy
Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin
by Molly Watson
Although the Romantic poets lived two hundred years ago, a remarkable number of their manuscripts, belongings, and other assorted ephemera still survive and are preserved in archives and collections across the globe. Most of the time, these artifacts are tucked away in museum collections, or specially stored in boxes to preserve the delicate paper or materials used to make them. Generally only a select few are allowed access to these items, predominantly the archivists, curators and custodians of these wonderful remnants and the researchers who are lucky enough to be working on them. Therefore, the aim of this exciting series on the K-SAA Blog is to bring to the fore the hidden and hidden-in-plain-sight artifacts of the Romantic poets, particularly those belonging to the Shelleys, Keats, Byron and their circles. We also aim to provide you, the reader, with behind-the-scenes access to these collections, along with insider knowledge from archivists, curators, and scholars.
In the following post, Molly Watson discusses her research into the Sara Coleridge collection at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin.
As part of my PhD project, “Motherhood, Children, and Loss in the Works of Sara Coleridge and Mary Shelley, 1820-1852”, I recently undertook a research fellowship at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. During my visit I looked at the Sara Coleridge Collection, which contains a lot of unpublished and unused material. The material I consulted there—correspondence, diaries, poetry, prose—reveals Sara’s interest in childhood. Listed in Sara’s inventory is a letter dated 1834 addressed to Reginald “Reggy” Palgrave (1829-1904), the five-year-old son of her friends Sir Francis (1788-1861) and Lady Elizabeth Palgrave (1799-1852). Thanking Reggy for gifting his uncle William Jackson Hooker’s (1785-1865) Exotic Flora (1823-27) to her son Herbert (1830-1861), Sara creates a story about the illustrated flowers that appear in the book.
Excerpt from Sara Coleridge’s letter to Reginald “Reggy” Palgrave, the five-year-old-son of her friend Sir Frances
According to her daughter Edith (1832-1911), Sara “found endless attractions” in Natural History, “especially those of botany and zoology”.[i] This interest emerges in Sara’s works for children/youth. She wrote poems for Herbert and Edith on the back of little calling cards, some of which are about animals and plants; a fair few of these were later published in the Pretty Lessons in Verse for Good Children (1834).[ii] Her fantasy novel Phantasmion (1837) centres on a young prince who transforms into various insects. In the letter to Reggy, Sara fancies that the plants of Exotic Flora—Miss Spadix, Mr Club-Moss, Mrs Doodia Fern, and Old Copper Beech—can speak. The wonders of the natural world was therefore a subject that Sara thought she could easily communicate to a younger audience.
The letter to Reggy demonstrates Sara’s pedagogic playfulness. She modifies her handwriting, which is clear and legible. Throughout the letter she uses syllabification, in which each syllable in a word is divided. This supports a child’s reading process and can also be used as a spelling exercise. It is used to good effect in the letter to Reggy:
[Flowers] lead us to think of the great God who made them grow and gave them such beauty and fragrance out of His won-der-ful Power and Wis-dom and Kind-ness. I can-not walk out of doors now, Reggy, but I like to look at the pictures of flowers and to shew them to Her-by, and he likes to sit beside me with the little globe in his hand, and to put his finger on the various parts of the world from which the Beauties in your Uncle’s book were brought: he is also fond of hearing what the Flowers might be supposed to say if they could talk: that is only fun you know, but perhaps you would like to join in our fun a little.[iii]
This is a fun game, but it also serves an educational purpose. For one, it is a lesson in geography, as Herbert (and possibly Reggy) point to different countries on the globe. This in turn points to how science and exploration were deeply embedded in colonial imperatives. Her poem “Good Things from Distant Places” in Pretty Lessons serves a similar function. In it, Sara teaches the child reader about tea imported from China and “sugar so delicious…From the Indies East and West,” omitting the slave labor that produced this delicious sugar.[iv] The letter to Reggy taps into these ideas of colonial acquisition, insofar as the flowers are brought back by his uncle to entertain and educate others. Sara’s emphasis through syllabification on the “won-der-ful” “Wis-dom” of God further illustrates how lessons about nature served a Christian agenda, thus shaping a child’s knowledge of the world.
Sara does not merely describe the biological classification of flowers; she imagines that they can think, feel, and talk. Talking flowers are a familiar literary trope (e.g., the flower beds in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871)). In Sara’s letter to Reggy each plant has its own personality. Miss Spadix warns her admirers to “take care you don’t give me a sly bite, for I warn you that I can bite in return”. The family of Ferns are “obstinate creatures” who refuse to move to Old Copper Beech’s home when Sara digs them up. The “surly” old tree is unamused: “now that I am old and stiff to grudge me room for my poor feet, and keep kicking and grinding me as if I must give place to a set of flimsy fan-tas-ti-cal nid-nodding Ferns is most un-grate-ful and ridi-culous.”[iv] By giving the plants conversational powers, Sara adds a fantastical element to her story. Moreover, her playful tone makes it an entertaining read. Yet it also allows her to easily transmit ideas about sentience, home, and displacement (for Old Copper Beech is uprooted from his home) to children.
Sara Coleridge, 1802-1852
It's clear from the letter that Sara delights in veering into the realm of nonsense. On the final page, she reminisces about the ferns she planted in Keswick as a young child, which “had been cruelly be-head-ed by the man who came with his scythe to mow the green. If your head were mown off, Reggy, it would never grow again: but Ferns ^and many other^ vege-table creatures have new heads every year”.[v] The image of a headless little boy is by all accounts disturbing, but Sara uses it as a metaphor for God’s power, as each flower grows back after it dies.
Sara’s capacity for humour is a side of her personality that is sometimes forgotten. In the letter to Reggy, playfulness is used as an educational tool—religious and colonial— as well as a vehicle for creating an imaginative story. While Sara wrote numerous poems and stories for Herbert and Edith, the letter to Reggy opens further lines of enquiry regarding her writings for children, as well as the type of “pretty lessons” they are taught.
Further Reading
Pretty Lessons in Verse for Good Children by Sara Coleridge (J.W. Parker, 1834)
Phantasmion by Sara Coleridge (William Pickering, 1837)
Sara Coleridge: Collected Poems ed. by Peter Swaab (Carcanet Press, 2007)
The Regions of Sara Coleridge’s Thought: Selected Literary Criticism ed. by Peter Swaab (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
Sara Coleridge: Her Life and Thought by Jeffrey W. Barbeau (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
The Vocation of Sara Coleridge: Authorship and Religion by Robin Schofield (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
Sara Coleridge and the Oxford Movement: Selected Religious Writings ed. by Robin Schofield (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
[i] Edith Coleridge, Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge: Edited by Her Daughter (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1873), p. 32.
[ii] Alexandra Wetegrove, “Sara Coleridge’s Pretty Lessons in Verse: Nineteenth-Century Flash Cards”, Ransom Center Magazine (2013) <https://sites.utexas.edu/ransomcentermagazine/2013/01/22/sara-coleridge/>
[iii] Sara Coleridge, ALS to Reginald Palgrave (1834) (Harry Ransom Center).
[iv] Sara Coleridge, Pretty Lessons in Verse for Good Children (1834) <https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Pretty_lessons_in_verse_for_good_childre/Mc8uk38ikAYC?hl=en&gbpv=0> pp. 15-16. S.T. Coleridge had emphasized the connection between slavery and the taste for “exotic” good things, especially sugar, in his 1796 lecture on the slave trade, published in The Watchman.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Ibid.
Molly Watson is a PhD student at the University of Nottingham researching motherhood, loss, and children in the works of Sara Coleridge and Mary Shelley, 1820-1852. In March/April 2024 she conducted a Research Fellowship at the Harry Ransom Center, where she looked at the Coleridge family papers. Her thesis is funded by the Midlands4Cities DTP (AHRC).
