Lamb, Hazlitt and De Quincey

Abstract

However much our sense of Coleridge may derive from his own writings, it requires a biographical focus, and it is to Charles Lamb (1775–1834), William Hazlitt (1778–1830) and Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859) that we owe the documents on which our awareness of Coleridge as a personality, a social presence, is most firmly founded. No view of Coleridge can be adequate that altogether ignores Lamb’s ‘Christ’s Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years ago’, or Hazlitt’s ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, or De Quincey’ s ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge’. All these accounts occur, however, in autobiographical contexts, and (as their authors well knew) to write about Coleridge was not only to contribute to a tradition of anecdotal biography inaugurated by STC himself in the headnote to Kubla Khan, in the Biographia Literaria and elsewhere; it was also to review and redefine oneself. A meeting with Coleridge was a significant event in many people’s lives; for Lamb, Hazlitt and De Quincey the encounter was crucial. More than a literary influence, Coleridge became a reference point by which they located their tasks, their values and themselves.