Abstract
A literary life begins with a literary education. In the Biographia, Coleridge is content to reach no further back than the classroom in the Classical Sixth Form at Christ’s Hospital School, where an eccentric James Boyer, headmaster and head teacher, channelled his aggression into enforcing principles of ‘GOOD SENSE’ as the foundation of all writing, principles which the literary autobiographer identifies, belatedly, as fundamental to his own creativity and career.
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Notes
For discussion of these and other forms of publishing in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, see William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 161–8.
Wordsworth describes Newton ‘Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone’, in The Prelude (1850), III, 63.
See Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 18.
Leigh Hunt, Autobiography, revised edition [1859], ed. J. E. Morpurgo (London: The Cresset Press, 1949), p. 56.
Lamb, ‘Recollections of Christ’s Hospital’, (1813), in The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, in 6 vols (London: Methuen & Co., 1912), I, 162–74 (pp. 171, 172).
Charles Lamb, ‘Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago’, (1820), in The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, II, 14–26 (p. 15).
See Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 45.
For a contemporary account, listing 500 such schools, see Nicholas Carlisle, A Concise Description of the Endowed Grammar Schools in England and Wales (London, 1818).
Johnson’s own ‘Scheme for the Classes of a Grammar School’, with its exclusively classical language teaching, is included by Boswell in his Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman, rev. J. D. Fleeman, World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 71–2.
From his syllabus for a school for boys in the Lake District, as quoted in Jennifer Wallace, Shelley and Greece: Rethinking Romantic Hellenism (London: Macmillan, 1997), p. 66.
See my entry under ‘Dissenting Academies’ in the Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age or, for more information, H[erbert] McLachlan, English Education under the Test Acts: Being the History of Non-conformist Academies 1662–1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1931).
As quoted in Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, revised edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 164.
Kenneth Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (New York: Norton, 1998), p. 176.
For an astute contemporary account of the ‘Public schools’, see the article by the reviewer and wit Sydney Smith (himself an old boy of Winchester) in the Edinburgh Review XVI, no. 32 (August 1810), pp. 326–34.
Kenneth Curry, Southey (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 10.
Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna, rev. B. S. Page (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), pp. 409–10 (V. 5, § 8).
John Milton, Of Education (1644), in Milton’s Prose Writings, intro. K. M. Burton, Everyman’s Library (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1958), p. 323.
‘You think it worth your while to hazard your son’s innocence and virtue for a little Greek and Latin?’ In his Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1692), as quoted in S. J. Curtis, History of Education in Great Britain, fifth edition (London: University Tutorial Press, 1963), p. 114.
For the battle over working men’s education, see E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), pp. 817–19.
E. P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. xiv.
R. D. Anderson, Education and the Scottish People 1750–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), p. 2.
Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), p. 39.
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© 2007 William Christie
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Christie, W. (2007). ‘The Discipline of His Taste at School’: Christ’s Hospital and Cambridge. In: Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230627857_2
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