ABSTRACT
The idea of an authorised biography, written from within the family, vanished as well. In 1938, E. K. Chambers completed his ‘Biographical Study’ of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and, since the war, a good number of biographies by professionals and academics have appeared – by Walter Jackson Bate, Basil Willey, Richard Holmes and, most recently, Rosemary Ashton. Ignorance was coupled with reticence: like Coleridge himself, Coleridge’s friends knew the damage to his reputation which public knowledge of the addiction would bring and, even in private letters, spoke euphemistically or indirectly about it. Letters such as the one Joseph Cottle published were another reason for hesitating over a biography. Coleridge was a prolific letter-writer and an absolutely reckless one. William Wordsworth’s life and Southey’s tell a success story – from obscurity to eminence, from struggle to achievement.
