The Background

It did not occur to me at all at the time that I was researching for my PhD that there was a coincidence between my life course and that of Coleridge. I was 22 years old when I began my research, as was Coleridge when he gave his first political lecture. He was already married and was trying various ways to earn a living. My state scholarship ended after three years and I too was then looking for employment. Working in the Civil Service, my wife was our breadwinner. I taught courses for the Workers’ Education Association and for the University of London Department of Extra-Mural Studies while applying for university teaching posts. I assumed that my doctoral research was a preparation for an ‘academic’ career. Although Coleridge and Wordsworth had, famously, been under surveillance of a government agent in the Quantocks, Coleridge was not an activist. He related to an idea of politics, to notions of individual liberty and citizenship, rather than to the cut and thrust of political behaviour. He opposed Pitt's suppression of liberty, but he does not appear to have been interested in the debates within parliament between, for instance, Pitt and Fox. Of course, the ‘people’ whom he addressed in his lectures were not necessarily electors since the suffrage was limited, and there was no sense in which he was involved in swaying the opinions of the MPs who ‘represented’ his audience in parliament. His support for his friend John Thelwall, who was tried for treason in 1794, was a form of vicarious activism. As he put it in later life, he existed ‘collaterally’ – a position which became institutionalised in his belief in the need for a ‘clerisy’ within society which would substitute for the Established Church in disseminating values. I was conscious that I was exploring, through my research into the development of Coleridge's thinking from adherence to a system of materialist Unitarianism towards a moralistic Rousseauism, my own transition from nonconformist conviction to a form of existential religious commitment. In this respect my research was instrumental in encouraging substantive changes in my thinking, but this was all taking place in a context which institutionally continued to objectify the detachment which was indirectly the consequence of the supposed legacy of ‘late’ Coleridge.