‘The Progress of His Opinions in Religion and Politics’: The Radical Years

Abstract

To attribute the changes in Coleridge’s career over the years 1792–3 to academic disappointment alone would be misleading. Other personal factors contributing to Coleridge’s growing alienation from the Anglican establishment that had legally fostered him since his mother signed him over to Christ’s Hospital in 1781 have already been hinted at. Besides the natural rebelliousness of youth, there were the temptations to indulgence that he encountered daily at Cambridge. At the time, Coleridge wrote with affected nonchalance of his drinking (and drunken) exploits to the Evans family in London (CL I, 31) – to whom, incidentally, he had become even more emotionally attached, spending his first Christmas at Cambridge there, rather than at Ottery St Mary, and falling hopelessly but silently in love with Mary Evans. There were also trips to London to catch ‘the Jordan’ or ‘the Siddons’ (CL I, 51) – popular actresses in a theatrical world that, for all its high cultural profile, was still morally and socially dubious enough to be fascinating. And there were the sexual delinquencies that Coleridge could hardly have been expected to confide in the Evanses. Later in life, in a letter to the scientist Humphry Davies, Coleridge had occasion to look back upon ‘all the loose women I had known, from my 19th to my 22nd year, that being the period that comprizes my Unchastities’ (CL II, 734).