ABSTRACT
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of the major poets of the British Romantic movement, maintained an active interest in the question of slavery throughout his life. In January 1795 Coleridge moved to Bristol to share lodgings with his fellow poet, Robert Southey. The two men had devised a plan to emigrate to the banks of the Susquehanna in Pennsylvania and found a Utopian colony there. To fund this venture the poets embarked on a series of lectures, one of which was Coleridge’s ‘On the Slave Trade’ given in June 1795. Coleridge’s Lecture promoted abolition by the dual strategy of legal restriction and economic boycott.
