Incorporating the Literary Family

Abstract

The familiar lines from Home at Grasmere in the epigraph to this chapter encapsulate the essence of collaborative and familial intimacy, and in what follows I pursue the implications of familial incorporation for Coleridge as he sought affiliation first with Southey and the Frickers in the family of Pantisocracy, and then later with the Wordsworths and Hutchinsons in Grasmere’s literary family. To contextualize Coleridge’s literary relationships, I begin by looking at two other models of literary-familial collaboration; in doing so I borrow and extrapolate from Naomi Tadmor’s notion of “incorporation.” As a way of describing “the alliance of two kinship groups” through marriage,¹ incorporation involves specific naming conventions that extend the applicability of terms such as brother, sister, mother, and father beyond strict blood relations. I rely on Tadmor’s formulation to demonstrate the suitability of this term to the business model of the literary family and to elucidate the means by which different literary families sought to “incorporate” themselves.

From crowded streets remote, Far from the living and dead wilderness Of the thronged World, Society is here: A true Community, a genuine frame Of many into one incorporate. (MS. D. 612–16)