ABSTRACT
In Autumn 1796, Samuel Taylor Coleridge put together a modest little pamphlet which offers a case-history of how texts can gather new and even urgent meanings through the circumstances of their transmission. So - seven years after the teenage Coleridge's first ecstatic encounter with Bowles's sonnets, memorably described in the opening chapter of Biographia Literaria, they are still a touchstone for his own work, a way of reaching out to his friends, and a gauge of his feelings for them. The key is in Coleridge's prefatory essay on the sonnet form, which he defines as 'a small poem, in which some lonely feeling is developed'. In a very different vein, on 22 September, the 'domestic' became the terrifying focus for Charles Lamb's life, on that 'day of horrors' when all his prospects seemed to close down. Coleridge has also designed his sequence bibliographically.
