Biography

[b]His Shaping Years[/b][br /]
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Coleridge came from a respectable family, though they were poor. His father was a pious, absent-minded clergyman and schoolmaster of Ottery Saint Mary in Devon. He was born on October 21, 1772 as the youngest of 10 children by his father’s second marriage. All of them were brought up and settled on their respective paths by their maternal uncle, as their father went bankrupt. The uncle was also a learned man, who published Gentleman’s Magazine, besides school books and commentaries on the Old Testament.[br /]
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Samuel resembled his father and was his favorite. Yet, he seems to have spent a lonely and miserable childhood. He often spoke of himself as if he were an orphan.[br /]
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A solitary child, playing alone and burying himself in nursery books as Tom Hick Athrift, Jack the Giant-Killer, Robinson Crusoe, Seven Champions of Christendom and The Arabian Nights. He used to sit at a window and read books by sunlight.[br /]
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[b]His Roots[/b][br /]
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Too little is known about his mother, who managed the home under trying economic conditions. She had the pride and spirit to enlighten her family. He had a bad experience in his childhood when he was about seven years of age. While fighting with his brother Frank, Samuel rushed to his brother Frank, who threw him on the ground and pretended to have been seriously hurt. Samuel felt bad and hung over him mourning and his brother leaped up with a horselaugh and gave Samuel a severe blow in face. Seizing a knife, Coleridge ran at him, but at that moment his mother entered the room and took Frank in her arms. Samuel ran away, thinking his mother to be partial and hid himself from villagers. But his father wept and his mother was filled with joy, when he was found.[br /]
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Coleridge said later, "My father was not a first-rate genius – he was, however a first-rate Christian." He had a highly neurotic personality. He emerged as the family genius, but also suffered from family embarrassment. His behavior appeared so irrational that his brothers entertained grave doubts about his sanity and at one point considered placing him under restraint in a private asylum.[br /]
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[b]Neurosis in Family[/b][br /]
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It is significant, genetically, that of his three children, two – brilliant Hartley and the even more brilliant Sarah, were markedly neurotics. Hartley became an alcoholic. Sara, in the strain of child-bearing, was severely incapacitated for a lengthy period what could be an acute anxiety-neurosis.[br /]
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[b]Early School Days[/b][br /]
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When he was two years of age he went to Dame School. By the end of 1775 at the age of three, he could read the Bible.[br /]
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He continued at Dame School until 1778. He did not look his age and therefore could not attend his father’s Grammar school. In his seventh year he was admitted to Grammar school and soon surpassed all his contemporaries.[br /]
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[b]Death Of His Father[/b][br /]
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His first, vital seven to eight years were fraught with experiences, impressions and developments that virtually guaranteed a rough passage for him through the years that lay ahead. His close and loving relationship with his father ended, when, within three weeks of his 10th birthday, the Reverend John Coleridge collapsed and died suddenly of coronary attack on the night of October 4, 1781. His death was calamitous for Samuel’s security. From that day onwards, he embarked upon Stephen Dedalus, a father figure – in search of a substitute father, which lasted until he entered the Gillman’s home 35 years later.[br /]
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After his father’s death, his family shifted from the old house, but Samuel remained at Ottery with his mother, until the spring of 1782, when he procured a Christ’s Hospital Presentation. He then traveled to London, with his maternal uncle, a tobacconist, who was proud of his nephew and took him from coffee house to tavern, where Samuel drank, talked and argued.[br /]
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He entered in the books of Christ’s Hospital on July 8, 1782, and was sent to Hertfort. He was happy for children well fed and cared of. He remained there for six weeks and in September 1782, he was drafted up to the great school in London. On arrival at London school, he was placed in the second ward, or dormitory, then called Jefferies’ ward, in the Lower Grammar School. After Hertford’s homely atmosphere the child found his change in surroundings traumatic. The discipline at Christ’s Hospital was ultra-Spartan and mood monastic. He drew his portrait of his early years for Gillman, saw himself in retrospect as a "Depressed, moping, friendless, poor orphan, half starved.[br /]
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" Charles Lamb, one of the boys at the school was an example of a lucky Bluecoat, for, with family and friends near the school, he was able to visit them almost as often as he wished and had all kinds of extras in the way of food and small comforts. Samuel was less fortunate, as his closest relatives were far away and could not keep him supplied with a steady flow of daily comforts.[br /]
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[b]Brother George Playing The Role Of Father[/b][br /]
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In 1784, his brother George, eight years his senior, took his degree at Pembroke and soon joined the teaching staff of New Come’s Academy, Hackney. He now, kept a fatherly eye on Samuel. He told his brother Luke: "I can never sufficiently express my gratitude to my brother George. He is father, brother, and everything to me." Upon George, Samuel bestowed all his pent up affections. His talents and intellectual capacity placed him, without endeavor, at the head of every class at school, though he was an undisciplined, and idle scholar, his caliber was such that he could not help but outshine other boys. He never resorted to physical violence, but he inflicted exquisite mental tortures upon all those persons whom he loved the most.[br /]
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[b]His Teens[/b][br /]
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By his 16th year, the quintessential Coleridge clearly emerged. He always referred to himself by his initials, which he often wrotephonetically as Esteese, Esteesee or Esteesi. Only his immediate family called him Samuel. It was a name he detested and he did all he could to discourage its use:[br /]
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"From my earliest years I have had a feeling of dislike and disgust connected with my Christian name: such a vile short plumpness, such a dull abortive smartness in the first syllable, and this so harshly contrasted by the obscurity and indefiniteness of the syllable vowel, and the feebleness of the uncovered liquid, with which it ends – the wobble it makes and staggering between a diss-and a tri-syllable – and the whole name sounding as if you were abeeceeing. S.M.U.L. – altogether it is perhaps the worst combination, of which vowels and consonants are susceptible."[br /]
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The name Coleridge on the other hand, pleased him greatly as he further said: “I think, that the word Coleridge, long from both sides, has a noble verbal physiognomy… it is one of the vilest Belzebubb cries of Detraction to pronounce it Coloridge, or Colleridge, or even Cole-ridge. It is and must be to all honest and honorable men, trisyllable Amphimaces, -- !"[br /]
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[b]First Love[/b][br /]
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At the age of 16 he fell in love. This first affair might stand as a blueprint for his subsequent ones, his wooing was conducted in literary form and ended disastrously for both parties, particularly for the girl. The girl was Mary Evans, sister of his friend Tom Evans; Coleridge was a regular visitor at Evans family, considered his mother as his own mother and fell in love with his sister.[br /]
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During his 19th year, in his last months at school, Coleridge had his first sexual experience with Mary Evans. His Farewell Sonnet to Christ’s Hospital hints at this experience, while a letter to Humphrey Davy, states that his 19th to his 22nd year was the period that comprised his unchastities.[br /]
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[b]At Cambridge[/b][br /]
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Coleridge was admitted to Jesus College, Cambridge, as a sizar on February 5, 1791 and became a resident then in October. In his worst nightmares he was to dream of his return to Christ’s Hospital. His outstanding memories of the place included savage floggings, semi-starvation, acute homesickness, loneliness and forced homosexuality. During this period he joined the military.[br /]
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In his 19th year, he left the scenes of childhood and adolescence, bidding them goodbye with nostalgic reluctance. In November 1791, he was awarded Rustat Scholarship, worth £27 a year. He also had a Christ’s Hospital exhibition of £40 a year. By June 10, 1792, he went to visit his family, where his mother banned his drinking wine. It is known that during this period of anxiety and pressure, prior to Craven, Coleridge resorted to opium. In 1792-93, 17 students appeared for the scholarship examination and he expected himself to be selected, but was not. He was depressed by his failure and mental depression invariably had dramatic effect upon his physical state.[br /]
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By early 1793, he was distinctly oriented towards opium. In mid-February he came to know about the death of his brother Francis at Seringapatam. Coleridge’s academic failure at Cambridge must have been the result of his radical political activity. At school, he had his head filled with classical studies, philosophy and verse. In 1789, he succumbed to poetic hero-worship of the newly published sonnets of Bowles. In early 1790, he wrote an ode on the Destruction of the Bastille. By the time he went to Cambridge, the universities were in a ferment of enthusiasm for France and the Revolution.[br /]
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In his undergraduate days he expressed enthusiasm for the Revolution, because it was the visible manifestation of the political and social democratic principles. He was drawn into serious democratic politics during his first year at Cambridge, not through channels but his interest in Unitarianism.[br /]
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During his first term at Cambridge, he had been greatly influenced by the company of Middleton, who was far removed from Unitarian thinking.[br /]
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[b]Life Tossing To Extremes[/b][br /]
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His immense intellectual capacity enabled him to break through the parochialism of the English climate, but his basic socialattitudes and responses were traditionally die-hard English. By the age of 22, he established the major tenet of his personal creed, corresponding to his mind and heart. He was very much impressed by philosophy of the English philosopher David Hartley. Hartley was the promoter of the associationist theory, the theory that promoted the idea that emotional, intellectual, and spiritual elements of human nature are based on our earliest sense experiences. Coleridge was so much attracted by the idea of 'association of ideas' and his book Observations on Man that he used to share his thoughts with his idol and contemporary, William Wordsworth.[br /]
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The reconciliation of opposites had become of primary importance and his lifelong intellectual and emotional endeavor to accommodate all facts and viewpoints. In the summer of 1793, he again submitted a Greek ode for the Browne Medal on The Praise of Astronomy. He was runner-up for the award, and John Keats carried away the medal.[br /]
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Coleridge was an incurable philanderer, privately scared of intimacy with women. Mary Evans’ mother could not realize Coleridge’s attention to her daughter. She thought that Mary would have to wait for him; but such a proposition was not outrageously unreasonable. On November 7, 1793, appeared his poem, To Fortune in Morning Chronicle. He did not have enough money to pay his bills or clear his debts of tutor. At a time he sold his clothes in order to survive. There were times when he toyed with the idea of suicide.[br /]
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[b]Designing Pantisocracy Scheme[/b][br /]
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In September 1814, he went back to live with the Morgans – first at Box, near Ashley, Bath and then he moved to Calne in Wiltshire. On March 7, he described his financial position and informed Cottle that his expenses were two pounds and ten shillings a week.[br /]
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Around June 1794, the society of England was rotten, worthless, ruled by avarice and self-interest, riddled hypocrites and its attendant evils. Even France, upon whom they had earlier pinned extravagant hopes, had betrayed the cause. Terror had become an official weapon of the Revolution and fraternity by a mutilated corpse. Coleridge came across a copy of William Godwin's Political Justice and the revolutionary within him immediately associated himself with the concept.[br /]
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A new beginning was to be done. A new wave of dedicated brotherhood crossing the Atlantic and pioneer an experimental community, embracing the principles of abolition of personal property, fraternal equality and a participatory government by all and for all was decided to be constructed. The prejudices and errors of contemporary society were to be destroyed. Fear, selfishness, and hatred were banished. For this, Coleridge coined the word Pantisocrat, which later came to be known as Pantisocracy.[br /]
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The leading features of Pantisocracy were worked out during Coleridge’s stay at Hucks, Oxford. According to it, 12 gentlemen of good education and liberal principles were to embark with 12 ladies. Prior to leaving country they were to have as much sex as possible, in order to discover each other’s dispositions, and then firmly settle every regulation for the government of their future conduct. The regulations relating to females were the most difficult, whether the marriage contract shall be dissolved if agreeable to one or both parties. They calculated that each gentleman providing £125 were sufficient to carry the scheme into execution. Every individual was at liberty, whenever he pleases, he could withdraw from the society. Coleridge preached Pantisocracy whoever he met. At times, they were being laughed at while there were a few who also showed interest in his scheme.[br /]
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[b]His Lost Love[/b][br /]
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Meanwhile, his girlfriend Mary Evans, came in contact with Fryer Todd, a young man of fortune, whom she later married on October13, 1795. Coleridge was not disappointed by Mary’s going away and bade her farewell. Coleridge and Southey wrote a play in order to raise funds for Pantisocracy. At that point of time, Southey introduced him to Tricker family. Coleridge, a pathological philanderer was in his elements with the pretty intelligent and lively Tricker girls. Coleridge made increasingly warm advances to Sara Fricker, who responded delightedly. He proposed, and the response was positive.[br /]
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Coleridge married the delicate, dark and vivacious Sara in October 1795 and had two sons and a daughter.[br /]
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Sara never permitted herself a syllable of criticism for Coleridge in presence of their children. She was always at pains to impress them with his distinction as a man and love for them as a father. Though an introvert, she was a proud and dedicated mother with deep feelings of love and loyalty. In her happier days of early womanhood, under the heady influence of Pantisocracy, she revealed a much freer spirit. She had a practical side too. Flexible and adaptable, she coped when left all alone for long periods, with very little money and no idea of Coleridge’s whereabouts. Her behavior during her engagement showed a surprising disregard for the conventions of female modesty prevailing among respectable young ladies of her day.[br /]
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Throughout his life, Coleridge attempted to pour flesh-and-blood women into the vapid mould of meek-eyed, characterless creatures. The results were inevitably catastrophic for both him and the women concerned. He was blunt with the men too for the same reason. His hopeless romanticism betrayed him into viewing people not as they really were, but as he wished them to be.[br /]
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Coleridge had a plan of starting a school of his own in partnership with Montague, but capital required was neither available to Coleridge nor did Montague possess a penny.[br /]
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[b]Lucky To Have Wordsworth In His Life[/b][br /]
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In 1798, he met William Wordsworth and was very happy for his friendship. The basic difference dividing the friends lay in theirpersonal philosophies. The central philosophical controversy of the Romantic era, the argument over pantheism was the dissimilarity between Coleridge and Wordsworth. This controversy provided Coleridge with major intellectual struggle of his life and was the inspiration behind his great masterpiece The Ancient Mariner.[br /]
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By 1798, Coleridge passed beyond the influence of Hartley. His dedication to Hartley is demonstrated by the fact that he named his first-born child in 1796 after the Master. Hartley’s enormous appeal to

Coleridge undoubtedly known by his philosophy continued to fuse Necessitarianism with Christianity.[br /]
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Coleridge explained the system of Priestley in Aids to Reflection. He adored Nature and much of his response to it was spontaneous in the Romantic way. His attitude to Spinoza was far from being one of categorical rejection. Coleridge passionately believed in the sense of the heart, it was the beginning and the end. By 1796, Coleridge thought through and saw through Dr Priestley. Priestley was a Jew, a Republican, theologian and scientist. Coleridge, abandoning Priestly, turned for a while to George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne. In 1798, Coleridge named his second son after the Bishop.[br /]
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Coleridge visited Germany in 1798-99, where he studied German and read German philosophy. Meanwhile, his son Berkeley died on May 14, 1798. His abandonment of Unitarianism took several years before he was prepared to accept the Trinity – The idea of God.[br /]
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He left Malta and returned to England in August, 1806. His unrealized dream was to achieve a systematic reconciliation of the ‘I am’ with the ‘It is’. He had a pathological dread of final decisions, he used to postpone it until the last moment.[br /]
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[b]Opium-eater[/b][br /]
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Taking regular opium was essential for him, in ever-increasing quantity, and in order to obtain it he was prepared to beg, borrow or lie, possibly even to steal.[br /]
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He virtually fought his way out of his bondage of opium, resumed a life of distinguished literary activity, emerged as the Grand Old Man of English Literature and succeeded in establishing a circle of secure personal relationships, which was nothing short of miraculous. Only a man with an exceptionally strong personal philosophy, or faith, could have achieved this. His ultimate acceptance of the Trinitarian concept coincided with the nadir of his morphine reliance. The terrors of drug enslavery and emotional and social isolation stimulated in Coleridge the desire for spiritual comfort. An appalling drug crisis in 1813, precipitated him into an ardent embracement of full Christian orthodoxy.[br /]
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[b]Romantic Ballads[/b][br /]
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Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry was published in 1765. This anthology of traditional ballads had a profound influence upon the work of both Coleridge and Wordsworth. Coleridge used to contribute his works to the Monthly Magazine, which paid him five pounds for long romantic ballads. In his note to Kubla Khan, he explained, "In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed." In the aforementioned note to his autographed copy of the poem, he further writes, "Two grains of Opium, taken to check dysentery." His verses written under the influence of drugs or alcohol were scattered throughout notebooks. Though, he started writing Kubla Khan since 1797, he could not publish it until 1816. Ever since its first appearance, Kubla Khan has enjoyed immense popularity, yet he kept those magical lines unpublished for nearly 20 years. Copies of poems with which he was pleased were always sent in letters to his friends. Kubla Khan was not sent to anyone.[br /]
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Until 1802, drug seriously disoriented him and poetry had deserted him. He never claimed that his poems came to him miraculously. He never tried to curtain the fact that he worked hard at them and was much involved in problems of technique. In 1802, he produced a poem, Hymn Before Sunrise in the Value of Chamouni, which he claimed to have poured forth involuntarily like a psalm. The lines are not his own inspiration, but are in part a translation and in part an expansion of an ode by Friederica Brun. [br /]
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Kubla Khan is a controversial poem, in circumstances of its composition, its interpretation, and its evaluation. Coleridge allowed Byron to prevail upon him to publish it because of its psychological curiosity and on the ground of any supposed poetic merits. The brilliance of the poetic imagination allied with a superlative technique has resulted in this poem. It suddenly switches in rhythm and abrupt changes in subject-matter, which exactly resembles his ignorance of the true nature of material written under drugs and of the extreme control and unrelenting concentration required for poetry of the caliber of Kubla Khan.[br /]
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It is a small masterpiece of confidence trickery, which in no way detracts from the uniquely beautiful and strangely moving poem.[br /]
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Coleridge and Wordsworth made a walking-tour to Lynton’s Valley of the Rocks. As they walked, they planned the outline of a supernatural ballad in the style as well as the spirit of elder poets. The adventures of a doomed seaman, and old navigator called the Ancient Mariner. The theme derived from the legend of Falkenberg. Wordsworth suggested the navigation of the ship by dead men and writes, "I do not recollect that I had anything more to do with the scheme of the poem," and therefore feeling himself to be at a block, left The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere to Coleridge. A completed version was ready by March 23, 1798, but was not sent to the Monthly Magazine and was used instead to provide the heart to the Lyrical Ballads.[br /]
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Coleridge and Wordsworth jointly planned Lyrical Ballads, which appeared in 1798. It evidently intended to provide a contest for the sense of wonder in common life that marks many of Wordsworth’s contributions. Together they entered upon one of the most influential creative periods of English literature. It became a landmark in English poetry, it contained the first great works of the romantic school. With it started the romantic movement. Though Coleridge’s poetic achievement was small in quantity, his metaphysical anxiety, anticipating modern existentialism, has gained him reputation as a visionary. The beauty and truth of the poem and the picture, it gives of writer's affection.[br /]
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The Ancient Mariner originated as a Gothic foray into the supernatural in the taste of New Sensibility, but as Coleridge worked on it, the poem developed into something very different. This, a work of genius was wholly misunderstood and undervalued by contemporary opinion, till 20th century. Now it has emerged as an autobiographical poem. Coleridge, in The Ancient Mariner, foretold the progressive development of the conscious awareness of his "I Am". The poem is a species of clairvoyancy, and traces an expanding state of Being.[br /]
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Opium had no connection with the poem, neither did he claim the poem to be an entire vision. It had 658 lines in its original appearance in Lyrical Ballads. Immense technical expertise and unrelaxing, yet brilliantly integrated imagery, the manifold sources, which put opium completely out of the question in the context of The Ancient Mariner. Coleridge had never made a sea-voyage, yet so intensely he experienced his readings of travelers’ tales that his descriptive passages in the poem contain the very essence of ice-fields and storms and tropical calms. It is an old navigator who relates this tale and not Coleridge. He wrote these lines nearly six years before he arrived at the stage of drug experience. He expresses that the least of God’s creatures, that crawled, were in reality miracles of creation, possessing great beauty of their own and deserving love and consideration. He writes:[br /]
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[i]He Prayeth best who loveth best[br /]

All things both great and small :[br /]

For the dear God, who loveth us,[br /]

He made and loveth all.[/i][br /]
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The moment he sees the amorphous and repulsive ‘slimy things’ as individual and incredibly beautiful water snakes, swimming in a track of golden fire and as he loved them for their integrity and beauty and blessed them, the load of guilt falls from the Mariner.[br /]
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[i]O happy living things! No tongue[br /]

Their beauty might declare:[br /]

A spring of love gusht from my heart,[br /]

And I bless’d them unaware![/i][br /]
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The triumph of The Ancient Mariner is that it portrays the salvation of an individual ‘I’ through an awareness of "All is One and One is All".[br /]
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Coleridge seems never to be aware of the fact that The Ancient Mariner was the great work of benefit to mankind. In 1797, he told Cottle: "I should not think of devoting less than 20 years of an epic poem. Ten to collect materials and warm my mind with universal science…So I would spend 10 years – the next five to the composition of the poem – and the last five to the correction of it. So I would write happily not unhearing of that divine and nightly-whispering voice, which speaks to mighty minds of predestined garlands, starry and unwithering."[br /]
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The first edition of the poem took five months, not five years, to complete, but during the ensuing 36 years he was to subject the poem to repeated alterations and improvements. First published in 1798, The Ancient Mariner is the supreme example of the way, in which he worked and reworked his poems.[br /]
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From the first reprint of The Ancient Mariner in 1800, up to the final version in 1834, there is no edition of the poem, which does not contain amendments. The short poems, which he wrote in 1798, the exquisite and contemplative Frost at Midnight and the conversational poem The Nightingale, reveal the superlative pitch, which he attained in direct and intimate blank verse – an experiment in spontaneous philosophical soliloquy.[br /]
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By April 1804, Coleridge left England to take up the post as secretary to the British High Commissioner of Malta. A man who intends to read life of Coleridge has to read 2,000 letters and 70 books written by him. After his journey to Grasmere he emerged as a man of genius who continued to live the life of extraordinary depth, insight and sensitivity. He is talked as ‘seminal’ influence on the 19th century. He was born in an age when the great literary epic or the grand philosophical system seemed possible. He died in 1834, when schemes of total vision and reconciliation had for a long time been out of question.[br /]
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The effect of opium as a contributory factor in his frequent illness is difficult to assess, for Coleridge – normally a veritable walking pharmacopoeia – is vague about the occasions on which he took the drug and the quantities he took. Records say that his addiction started in May of 1801.[br /]
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In spite of all his vows and prayers and attempts to Wade his friend at Malta, to restrain himself from drugs his one desperate wish was for 200 pounds – half to send to Mrs Coleridge and half to place himself in a private madhouse, where he could procure nothing but a physician and a medical attendant constantly with him, when there was hope.[br /]
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When he was back with Wade in Bristol, his struggle against opium resumed. "O I have had a new world opened to me in the infinity of my own spirit." He further said : "O I have seen, I have felt that the worst offences are those against our own souls ! That our souls are infinite in depth, and therefore our sins are infinite, and redeemable only by an infinitely higher infinity; that of the Love of God in Christ Jesus. I have called my soul infinite, but O infinite in the depth of darkness, an infinite craving, an infinite capacity of pain and weakness, and excellent only as being passively capacious of the light from above. Should I recover I will-no-no may God grant me power to struggle to become not another but a better man."[br /]
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Biographia Literaria (1817) was a series of autobiographical notes and dissertations on many subjects, including some brilliantly perceptive literary criticism. The sections in which Coleridge defines his views on nature of poetry and the imagination and discusses the works of Wordsworth are especially notable. He was well-known and respected not only because of his poetic and critical writing skills but because of his conversational abilities. Here he writes, "Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming."[br /]
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[b]Public Image[/b][br /]
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On his death-bed, during the final evening of his life, he dictated to his friend and disciple in philosophy, Dr J H Green, "And be thou sure in whatever may be published of my posthumous works to remember that, first of all is the ‘I am’, as the eternal reality in itself, and the ground and source of all other reality. And next, that in the idea nevertheless a distinctivity is to be carefully preserved, as manifested in the person of the Logos by whom that reality is communicated to all other beings."[br /]
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In 1816, he openly established a public image of himself as a romantic opium-eater. But later, he became the Grand Old Man of English Letters and in the opinion of many young liberal-minded English clergies, the foremost religious thinker of the time. Barely two months after Coleridge’s death in July 1834, De Quincey attacked him in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine of September 1834. Robert Southey, Poet Laureate, and his brother-in-law who in 1798, estranged from Coleridge, had been his closest friend.[br /]
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In 1836, Joseph Cottle, had noticed the degree of excitement and attention which De Quincey’s Confessions had aroused in Tait’s. He decided to leap on the bandwagon and wrote a book of recollection about his old friend Coleridge. In spite of bitter opposition, Cottle reproduced the opium-letters in two volumes of Early Recollections, which appeared in 1837. Ten years later he re-issued this work as Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey. In it Cottle quoted at length from Southey’s letters to prove that Southey supported him in his decision to publish the opium-letters. This collaboration between Cottle and Southey in their presentation of Coleridge as moral reprobate and slothful, did not do well, public imagination was more profound and lasting. This persistent reaction to Coleridge dilemma was a review, which appeared in The Times of April 25, 1895, on the occasion of the publication of Ernest Hartley Coleridge’s edition of the letters of his grandfather. Opium was assuredly what echoed throughout his life and letters, but our scrutiny and understanding of his dilemma should have changed radically since Early Recollections of 1837 and Reminiscences of 1847.[br /]
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