Historical dream account · English · original published text
The Coiners and the Wrong Staircase
Robert Southey
The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles; Appendix II: Southey’s Dreams (1881) · Appendix II: Southey’s Dreams, printed p. 369
Read in your language or share a constellation ↗
Cæsar in Balliol I thought was uninhabited, and going to ruin, like Pompey. I went up with somebody to Lightfoot's rooms, and found two fellows at work with a crucible. I saw they were coining, and one of them ran at me to murder me. I ran down-stairs, but found that at the bottom, instead of a door to get out at, there was the foot of another staircase, which would lead me up again, so that I made for a window, and got out ; the fellow followed, but being fairly out, I contrived to place myself between him and his haunt, and give the alarm, so that in his turn he fled, and was taken.
Diary entry heading: January 12th.
Source & context
A complete short entry from Southey’s dream register, describing a threatening encounter and escape. The coiners, pursuit and capture are dream events, not a verified accusation. The isolated heading supplies no year. The printed down-stairs hyphen is conservatively retained. Published in the 1881 edition edited by Edward Dowden, who is credited as editor rather than dreamer or recorder. Source framing — Robert Southey: “I found also a register of some fantastic dreams, noted down, as you may well suppose, not superstitiously, but for their strange combinations.”
Robert Southey, dreamer and recorder, “Southey’s Dreams,” in The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles, edited with an introduction by Edward Dowden (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, & Co.; London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1881), printed p. 369. Original English text from the Robarts Library, University of Toronto copy digitized by Internet Archive. Descriptive title and navigation themes added by Synastry.
The isolated entry heading prints January 12th without a year. No year is supplied from the neighbouring 1805 sequence, and no exact sleep date is inferred.
No Copyright – United States (1881 original English edition) ↗
Original English prose published in the witnessed 1881 edition; the original publication is public domain in the United States. Internet Archive metadata records NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT in the US and the title page visibly prints 1881. Robert Southey died in 1843 and the edition’s editor Edward Dowden in 1913; ordinary author-life-plus-70 terms have also elapsed where applicable. No modern translation, transcription edition or modern editorial additions are reused. No Copyright–United States identifies status, not a new exclusive license or a blanket worldwide reuse grant.
Source locator and text provenance
Appendix II: Southey’s Dreams, printed p. 369, IA leaf 411
The original text and redactions are preserved. The page title is an editorial navigation label.
Selected one complete recalled dream at explicit source boundaries; omitted adjacent accounts and page furniture. Joined typesetter line wraps and unambiguous split words, preserving source paragraphs and printed compounds including down-stairs and knick-knack. Applied only listed scan-verified OCR repairs; preserved the printed apparent form giftee. Added a descriptive navigation title, without translation, identity expansion or narrative generation.
- Account text SHA-256
- 97e1e7f80f0be9ce1774fd5a2aa584d6b7f1c8788c9633ef6c88f155e952942d
- Source file SHA-256
- 3105e7a9afc2e0cc5725208180a55c12f8cff63aaa5ad4ea8fc4ac861c7a0b41
Content notes
- Threatening imagery
Connections in the Loom
Titles, theme labels, illustrations and map connections are editorial navigation aids. They are separate from the account’s words and do not establish connections between real people.