ABSTRACT
Coleridge claimed that he offered the review to prevent Jeffrey’s wrath extending to his friend Clarkson who was at this time resident in the Lake District, and whose health was currently delicate. In a series of letters Coleridge claimed that the published review was altered by Jeffrey to include a passage disparaging the sincerity of William Pitt and another one eulogising Wilberforce, neither of which were in his original manuscript. Although he is clear that the slave trade was ‘an evil the most pernicious, if only because the most criminal, that ever degraded human nature’, the focus of the essay is more concerned with the cultural importance of Christianity and of civilisation for the Africans.
