John Taylor Coleridge, Forgotten Editor of The Quarterly Review

Abstract

In late 1824, aged 34, John Taylor Coleridge (1790–1876) inherited the editorship of The Quarterly Review from its founding editor William Gifford. A London lawyer with literary ambitions, a famous surname, and impeccable Oxford credentials, young Coleridge must have seemed destine for prominence in London’s literary circles. Instead, he prepared a mere four issues, March, June, October, and December 1825, before falling from favor with publisher John Murray and relinquishing his post to novice editor John Lockhart. Coleridge’s rapid rise and fall have been either forgotten or misunderstood. His biographer, Timothy Toohey, frames Coleridge’s life story around the legal profession, dismissing his periodical work as “prompted less by his love of literature than his need to earn additional income.” 1 Joanne Shattock’s excellent history of the Quarterly during the early nineteenth century notes that Coleridge’s commitment to the editorial profession is “unclear” and concludes, “in retrospect, it was generally assumed that [Coleridge] had taken the editorship temporarily.” 2 Regardless of his motivation or depth of commitment, Coleridge eagerly sought his fortune as editor in the turbulent world of the London periodical press. 3 Editors and the periodicals they served came and went, and only a few editors, notably Gifford and Lockhart at the Quarterly and Francis Jeffrey at the Edinburgh Review, achieved longevity. Coleridge’s place in the topsy-turvey profession might have remained a footnote in studies of the Quarterly but for the British Library’s 2006 acquisition from the Coleridge estate of thirty-five volumes of John’s private journals. Documenting Coleridge’s life from 1811 when he entered Oxford to his death in 1876, the journals shed new light on his remarkable life, including his interaction with the London periodical press. The purpose of this essay, then, is to use the newly available material to establish Coleridge’s brief but spectacular trajectory in the periodical profession: his tortured relationship