ABSTRACT
A modern-day William Pitt, feverishly hunting for imagined plots, might be tempted to think that there is among S. T Coleridge scholars a plot to ignore the political pamphlet The Plot Discovered. The immediate genesis of Coleridge’s work was the series of events which succeeded John Thelwall’s speech at the meeting organised by the London Corresponding Society at Copenhagen Fields on 26 October 1795. Coleridge’s early religious and political dissent owed something to a tradition of radical thought which developed from the English Revolution in the 1640s. Coleridge and other radicals of the 1790s frequently looked back to pre-Conquest sources and seventeenth-century precedents which they combined with a religious egalitarianism learnt from scripture. Coleridge attempts to expose Grenville’s constitutional gloss as little more than an attempt to disguise tyranny. Coleridge argues that the first mode of government is only possible when “the affairs of the whole are directed by all actually present.
