Derwent Moultrie Coleridge's Australian Exile

Abstract

The literary career and troubled life of Derwent Moultrie Coleridge (1828–80), Derwent Coleridge's eldest son (S. T. Coleridge's first grandson) has been critically overlooked. After a period of alcohol-related, reckless behaviour at Cambridge University, he was exiled to Australia in November 1850, lest he continue to dishonour his father and the Coleridge name. Despite struggling considerably, he quickly became part of an Australian literary circle and he often contributed poems to Sydney newspapers. This essay analyses the most biographical of his poems that was published in the Australian press, ‘The Loafer's Christmas’ (1871) – a hitherto unknown poem – looking, in particular, at the dialogues in which the poem engages with his family, especially S. T. Coleridge's ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. I also contextualise ‘The Loafer's Christmas’ within nineteenth-century Australian culture. Looking at issues of exile, idleness, addiction, family, home(lessness), and religious redemption, this essay explores the ways in which Derwent Moultrie's exile proved to be both a literary liberation and a dead end, trapping him between times and spaces, real and imaginary. In so doing, I show how the lost life and writings of Derwent Moultrie Coleridge can offer us new perspectives on the Coleridge legacy.