Group Reading of Christabel (1834), July 25, 2023
On Wednesday 25 July, 2023, forty-seven eminent Romanticists from around the world gathered on Zoom to recite Coleridge's Christabel. The recording of the reading and discussion has now been made available. The full text of Christabel, including the Preface, can be accessed here.
This spectacular event is organized and hosted by Pablo San Martín Varela (University of Chile) and Susan Wolfson (Princeton University), who has provided the invitation below:
You are invited to view the international zoom-reading of Christabel which took place on July 25, 2023, the 189th anniversary of Coleridge’s death. Pablo San Martín Varela, University of Chile was the inspiring force and material heavy-lifter for this event. Susan Wolfson, Princeton University, helped out with the planning and co-hosted.
The poem lives on!
Ever since that night on Lake Geneva in June 1816, during a season (that “year without a summer”) when the housebound company at Villa Diodati listened to Byron read Christabel from manuscript, this captivating, complex, alluring, unfinished, perhaps unfinishable gothic/meta-gothic tale has been ripe for the reading, to the eye for the ear. Byron, with full-throttle theatrics, did the honors for a group that included Mary Godwin, Claire Clairmont, John Polidori, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was freaked by Geraldine’s unrobing in Christabel’s bedchamber, to reveal, in stark contrast to the “beautiful exceedingly” lady encountered, a horrifying torso:
Behold her bosom and half her side——
Are lean and old and foul of Hue——
A sight to dream of, not to tell!
Too much for Shelley to behold, even in imagination: he writhed in hysterics and rushed out of the room, and said, later on, that while (still in the room) he stared at Mary, she morphed into a vision of a naked woman whose nipples had transformed into eyes.
Fortunately we managed otherwise. On July 25, 2023, an international group of readers (47 in all) convened on a zoom gallery for this entertainment, joined by another 30 or so auditors.
Coleridge had a lot of trouble getting this poem into publication. Byron helped out, convincing his publisher John Murray in April 1816 to sport a slender volume, which came out on May 25: Christabel, Kubla Khan, and The Pains of Sleep. Hazlitt quickly got a review into the June 2 Examiner that despised it viscerally: “there is something disgusting at the bottom of this subject.” Murray, with no love for The Examiner, shared the consternation. “I won’t have you sneer at Christabel,” Byron responded; “it is a fine wild poem.” He defended it again and again, in print and in correspondence. Murray, like Shelley, was revolted by the vision “lean and old and foul of Hue” and refused to print the line.
Christabel is the fourth event of Zoom Romantic Readings, or fifth, if we include the one of Adonais organized by Neil Fraistat and the Keats-Shelley Association back in 2021, on the anniversary of Keats’s death. John Bugg (chair of the Fordham Romantics Group) and Susan Wolfson produced The Eve of St. Agnes on the very Eve, January 2022, and followed with The Mask of Anarchy on the anniversary of Peterloo, 16 August 2023. Alice Levine then took the torch with the Byron Society (Susan doing some light-lifting) for The Vision of Judgment on Byron’s 235th birthday, January 22, 2023.
And the beat goes on. What next?
— Susan Wolfson
