Luke Savin Herrick Wright Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Anglican ChurchSamuel Taylor Coleridge and the Anglican Church. Luke Savin Herrick Wright. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Pp. viii+295.

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Previous articleNext article FreeLuke Savin Herrick Wright Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Anglican Church Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Anglican Church. Luke Savin Herrick Wright. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Pp. viii+295.Timothy WhelanTimothy WhelanGeorgia Southern University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreWright’s book claims to be “the first systematic examination of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s prose religious works,” an examination that offers much promise given the richness and complexity of Coleridge’s writings. Wright’s focus, however, is primarily on the development of Coleridge’s High Church “traditionalist”-Tory view (not fully demonstrated until his later years) of the “organic unity” of the church and state. Coleridge’s chief influence in this political and theological progression, Wright argues, is Richard Hooker and his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1588). Coleridge’s nemesis is Thomas Warburton (1698–1779), whose advocacy of “contract theory” in his popular treatise The Alliance between Church and State (1736) formed one of the foundational tenets of both court and country Whig orthodoxy of the eighteenth century. Wright explores Coleridge’s central role in renewing this debate between Hooker and Warburton—between organic union and contract theory, idealism and utilitarianism, traditional Queen Anne Toryism and eighteenth-century Whiggism—in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, granting Coleridge a key role in the resurgence of Tory politics and High Church supremacy after 1820 and a posthumous influence on Keble and the Tractarians as well as a young William Gladstone. Wright weaves his thesis through preliminary discussions of the Bristol Lectures of 1795 (what Wright calls Coleridge’s “Book of Pantisocracy”), The Watchman (1796), and The Friend (1809–10) before concentrating on Coleridge’s major religious works, the Lay Sermons (1816–17), Aids to Reflection (1825), the unpublished “Opus Maximum,” On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829), and the posthumous Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (1840).Wright’s case for Coleridge’s unified vision of the state and church is by no means unpersuasive, but he defends his positions (some are particularly novel in light of the general canon of Coleridgean scholarship, a canon largely ignored by Wright) with a confidence that takes numerous Coleridgeans to task for their inadequate readings of Coleridge’s printed texts, manuscripts, or annotations, as well as, at times, the larger historical or theological contexts surrounding Coleridge’s life and writings. For instance, Wright describes Deirdre Coleman’s discussion of Coleridge’s use of Hooker in Coleridge and “The Friend” (1809–10) (1988) as “superficial” (113), berating her for misreading Hooker’s Laws (the work was read at that time as a theological text, he argues, not a political one), misusing the word Tory (111), and for committing a “solecism” when she suggested that Coleridge’s support of Canning’s decision to send British forces to seize the Danish fleet (despite Coleridge’s criticism of Canning process of decision making) revealed a nationalistic enthusiasm and a corresponding support for the claims of individual that took him into “the morality of the pagan world” (123). Wright argues instead that Coleridge’s disagreement with Canning was the result of the latter’s “utilitarian” defense of an action that should have been based on a “paradigm of virtuous action through reason” (128).Though Wright believes he has spotted weaknesses in Coleman’s reading of certain portions of The Friend, Wright’s reading deserves closer scrutiny as well. If by 1809 Coleridge was embracing an “older” Tory view of the Christian commonwealth based on biblical ideals derived from Hooker and others, such a view was not readily apparent to many of his readers, certainly not the Baptist minister turned essayist John Foster, a former student at Bristol Baptist Academy, friend of Josiah Wade and Joseph Cottle, and admirer of Coleridge since the latter’s earlier residence in the West Country. Foster wrote the first extensive review of The Friend for the Eclectic Review in October 1811. Unlike with Coleridge, Foster’s reform-based, antiwar politics remained constant after the 1790s. In his review, Foster chided Coleridge for renouncing those “visionary ideas” concerning “the notion and the love of liberty” that had “elated so many superior minds in that eventful season” in Bristol between 1795 and 1798, when he wrote what Foster calls his “sublime” France: An Ode. Foster’s contemporary reading of The Friend is remarkably different from that of Wright, seeing little theology but considerable politics in the periodical, but not the kind of politics Wright believes had become central to Coleridge’s thought by this time. Foster could not understand how Coleridge, who in 1795–96 had presented himself in “the spirit of a perfect moralist, philanthropist, and patriot,” could in the pages of The Friend find ways “to extenuate the evil of enormous taxation; to make light of the suggestion of the superior benefit of employing a given number of men rather in making canals and building bridges than in destructive military expeditions; to celebrate the happiness of having the much greater part of a thousand millions of a national debt, and the attendant benefit of a paper-currency; or to join in reprobating any party who are zealous for a reform of the legislature and political corruptions.” Of the two, Foster unquestionably thought he, not Coleridge, espoused a socially responsible Christianity; in fact, Foster the Baptist would probably have preferred that Coleridge remain a Unitarian Socinian and keep his earlier politics than become a High Church Anglican Trinitarian and lose them.Wright’s selective reading of The Friend, however, is less egregious than his glossing of Coleridge’s exposure to and involvement with religious dissent in Cambridge and Bristol, 1793–98. Wright discusses the importance of William Frend in Coleridge’s initial experience with Unitarianism at Cambridge and admits that Coleridge’s advocacy of Pantisocracy in 1795 was his most radical phase, depicting in the Lectures published that year a vision of a society that would allow its members to experience, as Wright describes it, “a utopian Christian community of the purest form” (80) based on the “ethic of Jesus” (78), a community in which the “the temptations of inequality were abolished through reason” (80). To Wright, though, very little of Coleridge’s Pantisocractic scheme or the political radicalism present in the Bristol Lectures and The Watchman derived from Unitarianism but rather from Coleridge’s newly attained views of “Christian socialism” (80). “A great deal has been said and written on Coleridge’s relationship with the Unitarian Church in the Bristol area,” Wright argues, “but extremely little evidence has been produced to prove any activity within this community” (50). Wright adds that Coleridge did little, if any, Unitarian preaching on his Watchman tour in January–February 1796, even proposing that Coleridge may have fabricated his accounts of that tour. “Coleridge was one of the greatest liars of all time,” he contends, “and his penchant for self-aggrandizement is well known” (51).Though Wright downplays Coleridge’s early political radicalism and involvement with Nonconformity, he emphasizes an ideological connection between Coleridge’s “Book of Pantisocracy” and his later High Church Christian socialism, an argument, unfortunately, that distorts the historical context of Coleridge’s experiences at Cambridge and Bristol between 1793 and 1798. Besides his interaction with William Frend, Coleridge also met Benjamin Flower not long after the latter’s arrival in Cambridge in the spring of 1793 to commence publication of the radical newspaper The Cambridge Intelligencer. Flower, like Frend and George Dyer, had been a follower of Robert Robinson, pastor of the Baptist congregation in St. Andrew’s Street, and on his arrival Flower immediately joined the church. Robert Hall, the church’s pastor and an outspoken political reformer, had come from Bristol in the fall of 1790 to replace the deceased Robinson. Shortly thereafter Frend and Dyer left the church over theological disagreements with Hall; Flower, Coleridge’s first publisher, would leave over political differences with Hall in 1798. It was the Unitarianism of Frend, Flower, and Dyer and their reform-minded politics (given eloquent voice in the writings of Robert Hall) that a youthful Coleridge took with him to Bristol in 1794. There he met other like-minded dissenters at Lewin’s Mead and the two Baptist churches in Bristol—Broadmead and the Pithay—both congregations containing men whose friendships, like those Coleridge established in Cambridge, would play an significant role in his future: John Ryland Jr., Joseph Hughes, James Harwood, Joseph Cottle, and Josiah Wade.When Coleridge returned to Cambridge in September 1794, having just met Dyer in London, one of his first appointments was to have breakfast with Robert Hall, who wrote to Isaac James in Bristol that Coleridge was “a very ingenious young man, but intoxicated with a political and philosophical enthusiasm, a sophic, a republican, and leveller,” his comments suggesting he had received an earful on Pantisocracy that morning. Despite their general disavowal of Pantisocracy, Coleridge’s dissenting friends in both cities provided him with numerous letters of introduction when he set off on his Watchman tour, not only to Unitarians like John Edwards (Priestley’s successor at Birmingham) but also to Congregationalists like the porcelain manufacturer Martin Barr at Worcester and his business partner Tom Flight, an influential Baptist layman from Southwark and close friend of Benjamin Flower. At Birmingham Coleridge also met Thomas King (the former business partner of James Harwood’s father), whose pastor, the Baptist minister Samuel Pearce, had published a radical antigovernment tract during the Test Act repeal movement in 1790. Wright’s primary focus (and the chief strength of his book) is on Coleridge’s mature theological and political opinions; unfortunately, his attempt to place Coleridge’s dissenting phase within that scheme is awkward at best and, for the most part, misleading.Though Wright’s volume lacks the vividness of detail and historical contextualization that we find, for example, in Angela Keane’s Coleridge’s Submerged Politics: The Ancient Mariner and Robinson Crusoe (1994) or, on a smaller scale, the clarity and conciseness of Graham Davidson’s discussions of Coleridge’s prose works in Coleridge’s Career (1990), it nevertheless offers considerable background and pertinent insights concerning Coleridge’s appropriation of Hooker into his post-1809 biblically inspired philosophical vision of church-state relations. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 111, Number 2November 2013 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/671959 Views: 200Total views on this site For permission to reuse, contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.