Coleridge, Manuscript Culture, and the Family Romance

Abstract

It remains one of the great challenges in understanding Coleridge’s life and career to square his adulation of marriage and domestic life with Southey’s not unjust pronouncement “that no wife could suit Coleridge, he is of all human beings the most undomesticated.”¹ Coleridge’s early life of loneliness and loss, his disastrous marriage, his failure as a father, and his troubled friendships seem only to have nurtured greater longings for an intimate domestic circle. If, as Southey reports, Sara Coleridge had once chastised her husband for having been “a bad son, a bad brother, a bad friend, & a bad husband,” and if the accusation had “stung him— because it was true” (Pratt 17), it no doubt stung the more because of the central importance he placed on the family as a source of creative power and political activism. In this chapter, I argue that Coleridge’s poetic aspirations, particularly through his literary collaborations, were bound up with his personal search for a domestic ideal and with a wider cultural romance with the family.

… if I were to remain a few years among objects for whom I had no affection, I should wholly lose the powers of Intellect—Love is the vital air of my Genius.

—S. T. Coleridge to Sara Coleridge (10 March 1799) CL I: 471

But, whatever be the profession or trade chosen, the advantages are many and important, compared with the state of a mere literary man, who in any degree depends on the sale of his works for the necessaries and comforts of life…. He is something besides an author, and is not therefore considered merely as an author…. To these advantages I will venture to add a superiour chance of happiness in domestic life, were it only that it is as natural for the man to be out of the circle of his household during the day, as it is meritorious for the woman to remain for the most part within it.

—S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817) I: 237