Abstract
However much our sense of Coleridge may derive from his own writings, it requires a biographical focus, and it is to Charles Lamb (1775–1834), William Hazlitt (1778–1830) and Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859) that we owe the documents on which our awareness of Coleridge as a personality, a social presence, is most firmly founded. No view of Coleridge can be adequate that altogether ignores Lamb’s ‘Christ’s Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years ago’, or Hazlitt’s ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, or De Quincey’ s ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge’. All these accounts occur, however, in autobiographical contexts, and (as their authors well knew) to write about Coleridge was not only to contribute to a tradition of anecdotal biography inaugurated by STC himself in the headnote to Kubla Khan, in the Biographia Literaria and elsewhere; it was also to review and redefine oneself. A meeting with Coleridge was a significant event in many people’s lives; for Lamb, Hazlitt and De Quincey the encounter was crucial. More than a literary influence, Coleridge became a reference point by which they located their tasks, their values and themselves.
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Notes
George Whalley, ‘Coleridge’s Debt to Charles Lamb’, Essays and Studies NS XI (1958) 68–85.
W.B. Pope, ed., The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, II (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1960 ), 470.
Edith J. Morley, ed., Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers I (London: Dent, 1938) 23–9; CL III, 340.
H.A. Eaton, ed., A Diary of Thomas De Quincey, 1803, (London: Noel Douglas, 1927 ) p. 145.
John E. Jordan, De Quincey to Wordsworth: A Biography of a Relationship ( Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962 ) p. 30.
A.H. Japp, De Quincey Memorials I ( London: Heinemann, 1891 ) p. 132.
Lindop, Grevel, ed., Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985 ) p. 73.
Lindop, Grevel, ed., Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985 ) p. 3.
On De Quincey’s plagiarisms, see Albert Goldman, The Mine and the Mint: Sources for the Writings of Thomas De Quincey (Carbondale: South Illinois University Press, 1985) passim.
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© 1990 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Lindop, G. (1990). Lamb, Hazlitt and De Quincey. In: Gravil, R., Lefebure, M. (eds) The Coleridge Connection. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20667-4_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20667-4_6
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