The Coleridge Legacy: Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Intellectual Legacy in Britain and America, 1834–1934

315 Pages·2018·3.41 MB·English

by  Philip Aherne

THE
COLERIDGE
LEGACY
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Intellectual
Legacy in Britain and America, –
philip aherne
The Coleridge Legacy
Philip Aherne
The Coleridge Legacy
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Intellectual Legacy
in Britain and America, 1834–1934
Philip Aherne
King’s College London
London, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-95857-6 ISBN 978-3-319-95858-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95858-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018948204
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Cover image: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s study in Highgate, Haringey, London, c1835.
Artist: George Scharf
Cover credit: Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo
Cover design: Fatima Jamadar
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For my parents
In memoriam
R. D. Treece
1925–2008
A
cknowledgements
My first and greatest debt is to my parents, Daniel and Eileen Aherne:
without their support the work required to produce this book would
simply not have been possible; accordingly, it is dedicated to them. I
would also like to thank my siblings, their partners and progeny: Jenny,
Christopher, Simon, Patrick, Sara, Adam, Lucy, Sophia and James.
Research can be a lonely business, and in that regard, I am grateful
for the company of my friends, many of whom have patiently allowed
me to bore on about a subject of no real interest to them for longer than
courtesy required: James Lowe, Tom Russell, Tom Dods, Steven Taylor,
Harry and Laura Hurrell, Christopher Lloyd, Melissa Oppenheim, Greg
Lim, Rob Sinclair, James McGrady, Phillippe Roesle, Fariha Sheikh,
Gerard Miles, Jon Cooper, Jack Boteler, Jake Rowley and Shiva-Shankar
Mysore. Simon Jones and Darren McFarland were kind and generous
hosts during many research trips to Oxford.
The majority of this work was undertaken whilst I was a research
student in the English Department of King’s College London, 2010–
2014. I am grateful to the Graduate School of King’s College London
for awarding me a King’s Alumni Bursary and a King’s Continuation
Scholarship. The British Association of Romantic Studies (both the
International and Early Career conferences) and The Friends of
Coleridge provided me with opportunities, and funding, to present
my work at various stages. I would also like to thank the Symbiosis
vii
viii ACKNOwLEDGEMENTS
Conferences in 2013 and 2015, the Midlands Romantic Seminar, the
Oxford Romanticism Conference, and the Coleridge and Contemplation
conference in Kyoto, Japan.
A number of colleagues have been very generous in their guidance,
advice and friendship, and deserve my gratitude: Jo Taylor, Beatrice
Turner, Ewan Jones, Matthew Sangster, Matthew ward, Helen Stark,
Tom Owens, Kerri Andrews, Douglas Hedley, Peter Cheyne, Charles
Mahoney, Matthew Scott, Eric Nye, Graham Davidson, Justin Shepherd,
Emily Stanback, Jim Mays, Paul Cheshire, Robin whittaker, Nicola
watson, David Ruderman, Greg Leadbetter, James Engell, Samantha
Harvey, Jeffrey Barbeau, Michael Gamer, Nick Halmi, Jeff Strabone,
Karen Swann, Murray Evans, Suzanne webster, Fred Burwick and David
Russell. william Mander kindly shared essays from The Oxford Handbook
of British Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century before it was published.
I would also like to thank my teachers from my MA in Eighteenth-
Century Studies at King’s, including Clare Brant, Elizabeth Eger, Ian
McBride, Matthew Bell and Adam Sutcliffe, the last of whom introduced
me to intellectual history, laying the ground for this book. Additionally,
I want to express my gratitude to my tutors from Merton College,
Oxford: Richard A. McCabe, Tom MacFaul, Guy Cuthbertson, Kate
McClune and Jonathan Thorpe.
I would especially like to thank my former colleagues at King’s, James
whitehead and Monika Class, for offering detailed comments on this
work at the up-grade stage; Jamie was an enthusiastic and companion-
able secondary supervisor, and Monika kindly saved me from numerous
philosophical errors. Additionally, Seamus Perry and Kathleen wheeler
were kind, insightful and encouraging examiners.
I am grateful to Ben Doyle, for his patience and commitment to this
project, and to Camille Davies for her help during the submission and
publication process. I am also grateful to the two anonymous read-
ers for their advice and encouragement. I would like to thank OUP for
their permission to republish here my essay ‘The ‘way of seeking’: The
Coleridgean Development of Utilitarianism in Cambridge’, which orig-
inally appeared in Coleridge and Contemplation (Ed. Peter Cheyne).
I would also like to thank (again) James Lowe, Tom Russell and Guy
Cuthbertson for offering notes on the revised introduction, and espe-
cially to Greg Lim for scrupulously proofreading the entire manuscript
and receiving only a pizza as payment; Fariha Sheikh also deserves a sec-
ond mention for her invaluable advice on how to compile an index.
ACKNOwLEDGEMENTS ix
I would like to express my considerable gratitude to my former Ph.D.
supervisor Neil Vickers: this project began with the question ‘what do
you know about the Cambridge Apostles?’ back in December 2009, and
from then on Neil has been an unfailing source of encouragement and
guidance, patiently tolerating periods of lengthy silence and tirelessly
supporting my ambition, long after the Ph.D. came to its formal conclu-
sion. I am grateful for his friendship, and can pay him no greater compli-
ment than to say he is the ‘vivifying impulse’ of this book.
In finishing up the work on the final manuscript, I came across this
comment in a review of the Shawcross Biographia, dated 1908: ‘To draw
out fully what [Coleridge] achieved as a writer, and what mental forces,
still at play, he quickened as a thinker, is a task so far unperformed,
requiring subtlety and patience and no small measure of philosophic
and literary sense’. I hope the following is an adequate contribution to
this task, which will hopefully be continued by those with more subtlety,
patience and sense than I possess.
t n
extuAl ote
Readers should note that second and subsequent citations throughout
each chapter will cite the author’s name and the title of the book in an
abbreviated form. Multiple works by the same order are cited chrono-
logically according to date of publication in the bibliographies. If a series
of volumes (i.e. Coleridge’s letters or notebooks) is published over a
number of years, the first date is used.
xi
c
ontents
1 Introduction: The Elusive Legacy 1
Bibliography 18
2 The Sad Ghost: Coleridge as the Sage of Highgate 21
2.1 The Design of Education and Influence in Coleridge’s
Later Works 22
2.2 Teacher and Talker: Accounts of Coleridge’s Monologue 30
2.3 Fragment, Aphorism and Coleridge’s Intellectual Process 37
Bibliography 51
3 The Ruined Man: Coleridge’s Posthumous Reputation 55
3.1 The Repetition of Criticism: William Hazlitt to Leslie
Stephen 56
3.2 The Argument for Ownership: J. C. Hare to Sara
Coleridge 63
3.3 Coleridge’s Enduring Popularity: Lyman Atwater
to I. A. Richards 70
Bibliography 84
4 The Power of Criticism: Poetry, Aestheticism,
and Literary Criticism 89
4.1 The Creation of the Poet: William Wordsworth to Alfred
Tennyson 90
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