Sara Coleridge the "Essays on his Own Times, by S. T. Coleridge", and the Introduction to the "Biographia Literaria". In 1850, Coleridge discovered a lump in her breast. Her physician decided not to operate, prescribing cod liver oil and opium. Knowing there was no cure, she waited for the disease to take its course. "I live in constant fear," Coleridge wrote, "like the Ancient Mariner with the Albatross hung about his neck, I have a weight always upon me." Shortly before she died she amused herself by writing a little autobiography for her daughter. This, which reaches only to her ninth year,
The Keys to the Kingdom butler is compared to Nestor of "The Adventures of Tintin"; a character describes Monday's Noon as exactly how she imagined Jane Austen's Mr Darcy; the Piper is a re-creation of the legendary Pied Piper of Hamelin, who with his music led a population of rats from a city, later to do the same to the town's children, whose parents had refused to pay him the promised fee. The Mariner is likely a reference to the title character of the ballad "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Both the mariner of the book and the one of