Dissent: Anna Letitia Barbauld

Abstract

On 9 January 1796, Samuel Taylor Coleridge left Bristol for the major Midland cities intent on securing subscribers for The Watchman, his antiministerial journal. As his trumpet of sedition was still squeaking he went armed with ‘a flaming prospectus, “Knowledge is Power,” etc. to cry the state of the political atmosphere, and so forth’ (BL: I 179). Coleridge’s itinerary was nicely judged. His tour of Birmingham, Manchester, Nottingham, Derby and Sheffield included towns stirred by the Revolutionary tumult. As Richard Holmes comments, it was here that Coleridge ‘reckoned his natural readership lay … among the reading groups of skilled workers in the manufactories; among book clubs; and among all those who had felt the direct impact of Pitt’s war measures and taxes’.¹ As a ‘watchman’ Coleridge was a political radical, but he was also a ‘zealous Unitarian in religion’ (BL: I, 180).