Authority

Abstract

In September 1798, Samuel Taylor Coleridge left his wife and son Hartley at their home in Nether Stowey and departed for Germany with William and Dorothy Wordsworth. The opportunity came at a pivotal moment in his life. Earlier that year, saddled with bills and a young family to provide for, he weighed an offer to serve as minister at a local Unitarian congregation at Shrewsbury. Fortune stepped in. Josiah and Tom Wedgwood, sons of the Staffordshire potter, offered STC an annuity of £150 on the condition that he reject the ministry and focus on writing instead. He justified his decision in a letter declining the position to Rev. John Prior Estlin of Bristol:

I should be very unwilling to think that my efforts as a Christian Minister depended on my preaching regularly in one pulpit.—God forbid!—To the cause of Religion I solemnly devote all my best faculties—and if I wish to acquire knowledge as a philosopher and fame as a poet, I pray for grace that I may continue to feel what I now feel, that my greatest reason for wishing the one & the other, is that I may be enabled by my knowledge to defend Religion ably, and by my reputation to draw attention to the defence of it. (CL 1:371–72)

I do not want any book spiritually except the Bible, now that by my Father and Mr. Wordsworth, I have been put in the way of reading it to advantage.

—Sara Coleridge¹