Breaking Away: Coleridge in Scotland

by Carol Kyros Walker

Overview

When Samuel Taylor Coleridge set out on a tour of Scotland with his friends William and Dorothy Wordsworth in the summer of 1803, his wits were as sharp as ever but his health, professional career, marriage, and friendship with William and his sister Dorothy were in a deteriorating state. On the fifteenth day of their travels, the Wordsworths and Coleridge parted ways, ostensibly so that Coleridge could return home. Instead he pursued his own Scottish tour, finding pleasure in his solitude, speed, and endurance.

This book draws on Coleridge’s letters and notebooks to look at his travels with the Wordsworths from his own point of view and to record and photograph the journey he experienced after he parted from them. Carol Kyros Walker, editor of Dorothy Wordsworth’s own Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, now retraces Coleridge’s very different Scottish tour and recounts his adventures there. In a remarkable photographic and literary essay, she argues that Coleridge’s speed (263 miles in eight days), energy, reflections, notes, and letters all betray a man of great talent who was breaking away—from the Wordsworths, from his wife, from his life in the Lake District, and from a dry phase of his writing career.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300096415
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	12/11/2002
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	9.00(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Carol Kyros Walker is an artist in residence at the Art Institute of Chicago. She is also the author of Walking North with Keats and editor of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Reminiscences of a Tour in Scotland, both published by Yale University Press.

Table of Contents

	Preface	vii
	Introduction	1
	Epilogue	23
	Schedule and Itinerary	25
	Maps	29
	Photographic Retracing of the Tour	33
	The Travel Literature	129
	Scottish Notes	131
	Great Hall, Keswick to Gretna Green, Scotland	131
	To Dumfries, following the River Nith to Mennock, across the Lowther Hills through Mining Country to Crawfordjohn, following the River Clyde to Lanark	135
	Lanark, Falls of the Clyde, and onward toward Glasgow	140
	Glasgow to Loch Lomond	144
	From Arrochar onto Separate Ways	152
	Crossing at Ballachulish, following the Line of the Forts North	160
	Routing South from Inverness through the Grampian Highlands to Perth and Edinburgh	172
	Letters of the Scottish Tour	179
Letter 1	To His Wife	181
Letter 2	To His Wife	182
Letter 3	To Robert Southey	184
Letter 4	To His Wife	186
Letter 5	To A. Welles	190
Letter 6	To Robert Southey	192
Letter 7	To Thomas Wedgwood	196
	Select Bibliography	197
	Index	200