Coleridgean criticism has tended to divide itself into two opposing camps: prosecution and defence. The main charge of the prosecution is plagiarism, and the evidence of his unacknowledged borrowings from other authors is now virtually incontrovertible. But even the defence has failed to provide the true reason for this apparently unscrupulous dishonesty. Here was a man intellectually endowed beyond all his contemporaries, and who certainly did not need to pass off as his own the writing and thinking of others. So what is the explanation? Molly Lefebure, in this full and balanced biographical study of Coleridge, provides a wholly convincing answer. The really important factor, she considers, has been consistently underestimated and misunderstood: his drug addiction. His 'opium habit' is still being dismissed as neither so extensive nor so damaging as the poet himself contended. But now, and only now - with the full publication of a mass of immensely revealing new material in his collected letters and his early notebooks and with access to the unpublished notebooks - are we at last able to acknowledge and appreciate the agonised situation of this extraordinary being. His predicament was not simply a matter of sapped will. His imaginative powers and concentration were destroyed by the drug, his intellectual capacity fearfully eroded, his sense of truth hopelessly distorted - which is one of the major effects of morphine addiction. He was in fact a classic case of total drug reliance. All this is revealed and explained by Miss Lefebure with imaginative understanding and scientific detachment. She sees Coleridge's drug reliance as the key to many aspects of his life, and by drawing extensively upon the Notebooks, published and unpublished, she keeps us very close to her subject's complex and tortured mind - and to his suffering body. Often, indeed, the extracts from the Notebooks are heart-rending in their record of his many kinds of agony. Miss Lefebure is well qualified to write of drug addition, having served for years as private secretary to Professor Keith Simpson, the Home Office pathologist, head of the Department of Forensic Medicine at Guy's Hospital, and having also worked first hand with drug addicts. She brings a new approach to her subject, new theories, fresh information. At the same time, it must be stressed that she is not to the smallest extent exploiting or sensationalising this side of Coleridge's story, or in any way denigrating him: on the contray, that he fought his addiction so long and so hard, and with an impressive degree of success, must, as she says, very greatly increase our respect for him. More-over, the book covers every aspect of his life (with, for instance, a detailed scrutiny of his disastrous relationship with the Wordsworths), up to his retreat into the Gillman home in Highgate in 1816. At all the points Miss Lefebure's book is balanced, revealing and most freshly written. It provides an important addition to our knowledge of this many-sided genius and to Coleridgean study. It is, furthermore, a remarkably close and stark portrait of drug addiction. (Inside cover)
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