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ABSTRACT
This article reads Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” of 1798 as a visionary speculation on the ground-breaking technologies of its time—the steam engine and early experiments with steamboats. Within the larger framework of a history of the Anthropocene and drawing, more specifically, on science studies, current eco-Marxist perspectives and earlier (new) historicist research, I show how the poem blends two distinct epistemic frameworks and temporalities that have been neglected in critical discussions. On the one hand, Coleridge’s text resonates with the earlier mechanical philosophy and imagery from Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth (1684/90) which expounds a natural history featuring engines; on the other hand, it negotiates contemporary experiments with steam transport and James Watt’s patented improvement of the steam engine, in particular. Intimating an acceleration of (natural) history through human technology, the poem, I argue, displays a powerful and highly ambivalent sense of that acceleration’s social, colonial, and ecological entanglements. By way of conclusion, the article considers the afterlife of the “Rime” in Coleridge’s letters, and in Victorian engineering discourse; I showcase the poem as a spectacular and self-reflexive example of early speculative (or science) fiction.
Acknowledgments
I thank my colleagues of the DFG-Centre for Advanced Studies “Imaginaria of Force” for stimulating discussions and the German Research Foundation for funding my research there. Thanks for helpful comments and advice also go specifically to the late Frederick Burwick, to Mario Biagioli, Andrew James Johnston and Jeremy Davies as well as to Jolene Mathieson, Paul Hamann and the ERR readers and editor.
Notes
1 Heidi C. M. Scott has recently situated the “Rime” on the eve of fuel-powered transport, rereading it as “a parable of virtue and transgression … a weird and haunted poem” (242).
2 For a balanced survey of the controversy between Dipesh Chakrabarty, Donna J. Haraway, Timothy Morton, and others, see Jeremy Davies’s The Birth of the Anthropocene (41–68). Since then, Kathryn Yussoff and Dipesh Chakrabarty have further extended the discussion.
3 This conception of knowledge historicizes epistemic perspectives as suggested by Hans-Jörg Rheinberger in On Historicizing Epistemology: An Essay (2–3) and builds on the broad consensus, in the field of Literature and Science, on an opposition “against the radically conservative two cultures stance” (Meyer 7).
4 Unless indicated otherwise, all references to Coleridge’s poem cite “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, 1798” as published in Poetical Works (volume 16 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge). I draw upon the 1798 version of the poem, printed on the left-hand pages of this edition, unless otherwise indicated; the 1834 version of the poem is printed on the right-hand pages in the edition being used for this article. My article uses the familiar, modernized spelling of the poem's title throughout.
5 For a survey of these readings by Malcolm Ware, J. B. Ebbatson, Peter Kitson, Robert Maniquis, Patrick J. Keane and Raimonda Modiano, see Paul H. Fry (“New” 179–82). This perspective has been amplified by Siobhan Carroll, who reads the “Rime” in the context of a wider “geo-imaginary” (11, 37–42).
6 See, e.g. Trevor H. Levere’s Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science and Nicholas Roe’s Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life.
7 This is how Martin J. S. Rudwick classifies such treatises which he traces back to Descartes (134).
8 James Engell and W. Jackson Bate point out that the two mentions of the translation project in the mid 1790s (61, 174) refer to the Latin version of the Sacred Theory; Coleridge may not yet have known the powerful translation which Burnet had published himself. Judging by an entry after the “Rime” had been published, in chapter fourteen of the Biographia Literaria, the quality of Burnet’s text created a lasting impression: “The writings of Plato, and Bishop Taylor and the Theoria Sacra of Burnet, furnish undeniable proofs that poetry of the highest kind may exist without metre, and even without the contradistinguishing object of a poem” (14).
9 The credit to thus reinstating Burnet—the “villain of Whig history”—goes to Stephen Jay Gould (10, 21–59).
10 The theater metaphor pervades the treatise (e.g. Burnet 1: 192, 238, 453; 2: 6, 26, 229, 309), with the author commenting on his position as spectator (e.g. 2: end of “Preface,” 2).
11 For the seventeenth century, see Graham Hollister-Short; for later references in the early eighteenth and nineteenth century, see H. Philip Spratt (9, 30).
12 When approaching the “Rime” in this context, volume one of Coleridge’s Notebooks remains suggestive. Kathleen Coburn plausibly relates entries to passages in the Sacred Theory where the text is not explicitly named. Most relevant is the jotting “Millenium, an History of, as brought about by a progression in natural philosophy—particularly, meteorology or science of airs & winds—/ Quære—might not a Commentary on the Revelations be written from late philosophical discoveries?” (133). The passage establishes a set of crucial concerns. It appears to say that this science of winds and airs may help to explain and thus to write a speculative natural history of the millennium—understood as a genre familiar from Burnet’s Sacred Theory. Less obviously, the passage could suggest that this science may materially “bring about” the history of the millennium—understood as a series of future events rather than their recording. This potentially twofold role of science in Coleridge’s formulation, as facilitating the writing of natural history, past or future, or as actively precipitating that natural history, will also become relevant in my reading of the “Rime.”
The second part of the entry—“might not a Commentary on the Revelations be written from late philosophical discoveries?”—more directly recalls Burnet’s second volume of the Sacred Theory devoted to the narrative of the Revelations. Thinking of Burnet’s formidable commentary on the Revelations, Coleridge may have contemplated the possibility of an updated version. Thus perceived, he would have highlighted a desideratum, a text yet to be “written from late philosophical discoveries” and including much more recent theories of the earth.
A list of twenty-seven jottings (174), probably produced around the same time, and glossed by the editor as “projected works,” is worth mentioning. Referring to the translation of the Sacred Theory and to “Christian, the mutineer” whom the editor, with John Lowes, tentatively links to the figure of the Ancient Mariner, the entry would document the simultaneity of projects related to Burnet on the one hand, and the prehistory of the “Rime” on the other, even as a third one entitled “Hymns to the Sun, the Moon, and the Elements” broadens Coleridge’s earlier concern with “airs & winds” to “the Elements.” (Lowes argues, more specifically, that “‘The Ancient Mariner’ fell heir to the garnerings … for the unwritten Hymns to the Elements” [135]).
13 See Ben Marsden’s Watt’s Perfect Engine, Richard L. Hills’s James Watt, and David Phillip Miller’s The Life and Legend of James Watt.
14 American Statesman Daniel Webster remarked on the British steamship Great Western in 1838: “We behold two continents approaching each other. The skill of your countrymen, sir, and my countrymen, is annihilating space” (qtd. in Burgess 7).
15 This is best documented in The Correspondence of Joseph Black where James Watt and James Hutton figure prominently; they also corresponded directly about engines and geology. In the case of Hutton, the significance of an older, chemical conception of heat reaching back to Herman Boerhaave is highlighted by Arthur Donovan (Miller “Seeing” 50).
16 Gilbert’s biographer generalizes “he knew so much more about the theory of mechanics that lay behind the engineering achievements of his day that his technical advice was constantly being sought by men of the calibre of Telford, Davy, Babbage, Hornblower and many of the country’s leading ironmasters” (Todd 7).
17 Waldron quotes from a graphic description of chimney sweeps choking to death during their work: “Scrotal cancer … was the first malignant disease to be connected with a specific occupation when in 1775 Percivall Pott described its occurrence in chimney sweeps” (390).
18 In a much later poem, “Youth and Age” (1823), Coleridge evokes steam boats with “Like those trim skiffs, unknown of yore / … / That ask no aid of Sail or Oar, / That fear no spite of Wind or Tide!” (12–15, my emphasis).
19 Spratt describes John Smith’s experimental steamboat journeying from Liverpool to Newton in 1793, adding “Smith, who was ridiculed in Liverpool, is said to have replied that in his opinion ‘before twenty years are over, you will see this river (the Mersey) covered with smoke’” (57). Tobias Menely’s recent study, Climate Change and the Making of Worlds, offers an in-depth reading of contemporary climate scenarios to which I can only point here.
20 For a closer reading of this passage in the context of contemporary poetics, see Berns’s “Coleridge’s Ecologies and Energy Poetics” (forthcoming).
21 See Mays’s editorial comment to the “Rime” in Coleridge’s Poetical Works (367) and Alan Richardson (145–46). The quotations here are drawn from a 1798 edition stanza (and thus the differentiated citation).
22 According to Barbara Freese, the country sees a tenfold increase in its coal industry between 1700 and 1830 (67); E. A. Wrigley’s comparative analysis suggests that the combined output of coal in Belgium, France and Germany was less than twenty percent of England and Wales’s around 1800 (98–99), and Vaclav Smil amplifies these figures in a long-term perspective (236).
23 More specifically, Hugh Torrens reconstructs a correspondence between Beddoes and Erasmus Darwin that touches “on the origin of both coal and oil” in relation to Huttonian theory (Levere, Stewart and Torrens 87–88).
24 Hsu (51) brought this letter to my attention.
25 These lines come from a stanza appearing in the 1798 text of the poem.
26 Coleridge himself seems to highlight the character’s unbounded temporality when noting, the Ancient Mariner “was in my mind the everlasting wandering Jew” (Table Talk 273–74).
27 Fry suggests that “parts IV through VI, in the opinion of most readers, could be much compressed,” and this comment also reflects most critics’ attitude (“Biographical” 16).
28 For a more recent usage of “cutting off” the steam, see Marsden 37, 122.
29 Coleridge’s Notebooks entry, “In the paradisiacal World Sleep was voluntary and holy—a spiritual before God, in which the mind elevated by contemplation retired into pure intellect suspending all commerce with sensible objects and perceiving the present deity” (1: 191), has been linked to Burnet’s vision of the millennium in which contemplation is to lead to an enlightened state of mind that allows for “a great Proficiency in the knowledge of all things, Divine and Intellectual” (1: 191n; 2: 299). This seems suggestive as background for the mariner’s “swound” or “fit” (392–93) because Burnet does not only write about the spirits’ potential agency in augmenting inflammability, but he includes the conversation with angels as potentially contributing to that higher state of millennial knowledge (2: 295–96), a knowledge that encompasses the “Doctrine” of the corporeal universe (2: 302).
30 One of them was the largest engine modeled on a Watt design that was ever built and is now a museum. The design built on Watt’s improvements but allowed for higher steam pressure (“#153 Cruquius Pumping Station.”); further, less technical, details are provided in “Haarlem Lake.”
31 In the Notebooks of 1795–1796, as mentioned above, Coleridge referred to the project of “Hymns to the Sun, the Moon, and the Elements—six hymns” (174). The editor draws attention to a letter of 1821 in which “the Hymns were ‘entitled Spirit, Sun, Earth, Air, Water, Fire, and Man’, having in the Coleridgian manner grown from six to seven in number” (174n). It is worth noting that the list has not only been enlarged, but also, and very specifically, modified. If we grant, in the 1790s, the poet did, in fact, move towards a recognition of the anthropogenic powers of man that took shape in the “Rime,” then his retrospective modification shines with precision—by adding both “Spirit” and “Man” to what was conceived as a list of elemental forces.
32 See Mays’s note to “Rime” in Coleridge’s Poetical Works (366).
33 Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy: Oryx and Crake (2003); The Year of the Flood (2009); MaddAddam (2013), and Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019).