Coleridge as godfather: a corrected text of his 14 August 1828 letter to Richard Cattermole. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

WHEN the following letter from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to the Reverend Richard Cattermole was first published in E. H. Coleridge's Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the recipient was misidentified as George Cattermole.(1) When the letter was again published in the Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Earl Leslie Griggs correctly suggested Richard Cattermole as the letter's probable recipient.(2) But because Griggs did not have access to the manuscript, this identification was not positively established. Furthermore, E. H. Coleridge, followed by Griggs, produced a text of the letter that was rife with errors in spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and even wording. The manuscript of Coleridge's letter to Cattermole, recently acquired by the Pennsylvania State University Library, includes the postal leaf addressed to Richard …