ABSTRACT
This chapter gives the last word to another more comical and imaginative attack in 'Blackwood's', this one aimed at Francis Jeffrey rather than Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which momentarily takes this feud beyond 'personality' not in the sense of choice of theme but in the sense that cultural production subsumes individual motivation. The amount of attention paid to this incident suggests that Coleridge and his literary life have to be seen as enmeshed in the 'age of personality', caught within the politicized squabbles of the 'critical machine'. The distinction between superficially personal and more profoundly impersonal is complicated by the content of the Biographia as well as by the circumstances of its composition and reception. The feud between Coleridge and Jeffrey relies on even as it unsettles essentialized notions of Romantic identity. Wilson here exposes the rich seam of paranoia running through the Biographia, reducing Coleridge's analysis of the failings of the Whig Edinburgh to nothing more than a private obsession.
