ABSTRACT
The son of a farmer in Derbyshire, Allsop travelled to London aged seventeen and joined his uncle’s silkmercery business; from there, he moved to the Stock Exchange and made a fair amount of money from investing in the railways. Allsop’s political sympathies were clearly very different from the later Coleridge’s – the DNB describes him as ‘one of the unseen forces of revolution in his day’ and he was prepared to intervene on behalf of Feargus O’Connor, one of the leaders of the Chartists, in 1848. The Letters Conversations and Recollections is a miscellaneous book, consisting largely of Coleridge’s letters to Allsop with linking passages and some commentary. Full of striking detail, it conjures up the heady atmosphere of Thursday evenings in Highgate and comes closest, perhaps, to the world Henry James evokes in his short story based on Coleridge, ‘The Coxon Fund’.
