Coleridge and the Lunaticks

Abstract

On 28 February 1794, the Reverend George Coleridge, master at Mr Newcome’s Academy in Hackney received a letter from his younger brother, Private Silas Tomkyn Comberbache, which described his lodgings in the Henley Workhouse and his duties to a companion suffering from the smallpox, and listed some bills for settlement (CL, i, 69). On the same day, at the nearby Gravel Pit Meeting House in Hackney, the beleaguered radical, Dr Joseph Priestley, in a sermon on The present State of Europe compared with Antient.Prophecies, looked around at the social and political turmoil in Britain, and warned his congregation that the end of the world was approaching. Five weeks later, as young ‘Comberbache’ was discharged from the King’s Dragoons and set off for Cambridge to resume his undergraduate career, Priestley and his family left England for permanent exile in Pennsylvania.

In the West of England… there has been a succession of authors, who… have fancied that they were born to effect some mighty revolution in the different departments to which they applied themselves. We need only run over the names of Darwin, Day, Beddoes, Southey, Coleridge, and Priestley to make ourselves perfectly intelligible.

Francis Jeffrey, ‘Memoirs of Dr. Joseph Priestley’¹