Remembering Devon's S.T. Coleridge 250 years on

This month marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We take a look at the life of this ground-breaking literary figure who was born in Devon.

The son of a vicar of Ottery Saint Mary, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was a man with an addiction, affliction and conviction. He was deeply flawed and therefore highly interesting but was also a renowned poet, critic, philosopher and theologian who retained his West Country accent. He was born 250 years ago on 21st October.

The church of St Mary, Ottery Saint Mary, where Samuel Taylor Coleridge's father was vicar (Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Born in the demolished Old School House, Samuel was the son of John Coleridge (1718-81), who’d also been Head at the King’s School in Ottery for a dozen years by then. The youngest of ten children emerging from John’s second marriage, Samuel was sent to school in London aged eight on the death of his father.

This Devonian’s life was colourful. His Cambridge University education was interrupted by a ‘runaway enlistment in the 15th Dragoons’ whilst he also took on revolutionary views whilst at university (as you do). Coleridge met a like-minded revolutionary in Bristol in 1794, Robert Southey, the pair whimsically planning a ‘communist society’ that in airy-fairy fashion came to nought. The following year Coleridge met Wordsworth, again in Bristol.

Coleridge worked as a journalist and lecturer publishing his first book of loss-making poems in 1796. The book is noteworthy for Samuel’s Ode to France in which he backpedals on some of his former revolutionary fervour. In the same year Samuel’s elder brother James, a distinguished soldier wed to a local heiress, bought Chanters House in Ottery which became the Coleridge family pile, accumulating one of the West Country’s standout libraries of over 20,000 volumes. It remained a Coleridge possession for around 200 years.

Plaque to Samuel Taylor Coleridge at St Mary's Church in Ottery Saint Mary (Image: Courtesy of Sands of Time Consultancy / Ottery Museum)

Coleridge married Southey’s sister-in-law, Sara (or Sarah) Fricker (c.1770-1845), the newlyweds being lent a mice-ridden cottage in Nether Stowey in Somerset by another ‘friend of liberty’. Coleridge dubbed it the ‘hovel’. It was here Coleridge enjoyed the company of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, the triumvirate of so-called ‘Lake Poets’, Southey, Coleridge and Wordsworth, now established.

The rear garden at Coleridge Cottage, the National Trust property at Nether Stowey in Somerset (Image: A(C)National Trust Images/John Millar)

It was a Samuel-William collaboration, Lyrical Ballads, published in 1798, which changed English poetry with a seismic shift towards something more natural, a compilation beginning with Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Wordsworth wasn’t that partial to this tale of a cursed sailor and relegated it to the backend of the book’s later editions. The Somerset sojourn was enlivened by Coleridge and Wordsworth being mistaken for French spies. Luckily they were written off as harmless ‘oddballs’.

This 1812 portrait of Samuel Taylor Coleridge is on two sheets joined together, known as 'laid paper'. George Dawe sketched the head and shoulders from life before completing the body on the second sheet. Coleridge, often critical of representations of himself, remarked that Dawe 'had produced a chalk drawing of my face which I think far more like than any former attempt'. (Image: Sands of Time Consultancy / Ottery Museum)

In 1800 Coleridge joined the Wordsworths and Southey in the Lakes but just when it looked like everything was set fair Samuel suffered a ‘moral collapse’ linked to an opium addiction. Coleridge’s problems stemmed from his crippling anxiety and depression, and physical un-healthiness. The next few years were angst-ridden for Coleridge and his friends. His Ode to Dejection in 1802 was aptly-named although also a critique of Wordsworth which strained relations between the pair. His affliction meanwhile was the odd dose of ‘colygraphia’, or writer’s block. To quote his Ancient Mariner back at him, Coleridge may have felt like he had the proverbial ‘albatross around his neck’.

Statue of the Ancient Mariner, Watchet, Somerset. Coleridge's creation has the proverbial albatross around his neck (Image: Steve Roberts)

Coleridge travelled, before and after descending into drugs. He went to Germany from 1798-99, embracing Teutonic philosophy and criticism. Later, he’d go to Malta. But come 1816 he’d be settled in London, a houseguest of the Gillmans, whilst continuing writing and lecturing. James Gillman, a pioneering addiction physician, did his utmost to cure Coleridge but never quite succeeded.

Mudeford, then in Hampshire, but now in Dorset, to where the Gillman family and Samuel Taylor Coleridge came on holiday in 1816 as James Gillman tried to control if not cure Coleridge's opium addiction (Image: Steve Roberts)

One ploy was to take the poet on holiday, for example, to Mudeford (Dorset today) from September to November 1816 which helped control Coleridge’s opium intake if not rid him of it. 1816 was a red-letter year, for Coleridge also published Kubla Khan. His Biographia Literaria set the record straight where Wordsworth was concerned, leaving us appreciating William’s greatness, although some critics still felt Samuel was getting something off his chest regarding his onetime collaborator and might have been wiser to stop picking at the sore.

We have words and phrases courtesy of Coleridge, my personal favourite being ‘suspension of disbelief’ (wonderful) with ‘all things great and small’ a close second. He certainly held the conviction he was a poet despite all that self-doubting and self-loathing. He established a literary dynasty too. Samuel and Sara had four children, one of whom died an infant, the other three all becoming published authors.

Coleridge wrote two poems related to Ottery Saint Mary, one to the River Otter and one to the Pixie Parlour which is a small cave in the local sandstone in the bank above the Otter (Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto)

For details about visiting Coleridge Cottage in Nether Stowey go to www.nationaltrust.org.uk

Did you know?

1. Coleridge was an admirer of Gilbert White who wrote The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne.
2. Wordsworth and Coleridge were both lampooned by James Hogg in his The Poetic Mirror.
3. It was whilst in an opium-induced fug that Coleridge was inspired to write Kubla Khan.
4. The phrase ‘All Creatures Great and Small’ hails from Coleridge’s ‘all things great and small’.
5. Coleridge and Southey dreamed of establishing an early hippy community in America.
6. Coleridge’s unrequited love was with Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, Sara Hutchinson.
7. Great Cambridge poets included Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Tennyson and Milton.
8. Coleridge wrote two poems related to Ottery, one to the River Otter and one to the Pixie Parlour.
9. Five years before Coleridge’s birth, Ottery’s great fire destroyed 50 properties around the church.
10. In the TV series The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin Reggie lived at 12, Coleridge Close.

Chronology

1760 – John, the father of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, becomes head of Ottery’s King’s School.
1772 – Birth of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Ottery Saint Mary (21st October).
1795 – Marries Sara Fricker, Robert Southey’s sister-in-law.
1796 – Samuel’s older brother, James, buys Chanters House, the Coleridge family home.
1798 – Publication of ‘Lyrical Ballads’, a collaboration with William Wordsworth.
1800 – The three ‘Lake Poets’ are established in the Lake District, including Coleridge.
1816 – Settled in London, Coleridge goes on holiday to Mudeford with the Gillmans.
1834 – Death of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Highgate, London (25th July), aged 61.