Metaphysics in the Beddoes Circle: Tom Wedgwood, S. T. Coleridge, Erasmus Darwin, Humphry Davy

Abstract

Making heavy use of unpublished and little-consulted manuscripts, this article argues for the hitherto underappreciated roles of Thomas Beddoes and, especially, Thomas Wedgwood, in developing an account of perception and of memory that significantly modified the British empirical tradition shaped by David Hartley and Erasmus Darwin. It shows that, among several in Beddoes’s circle who assisted Wedgwood in formulating his thinking on these matters, James Mackintosh and S. T. Coleridge were particularly important. It then argues that the verse accounts of perception and memory that Coleridge articulated in “Frost at Midnight” and “Dejection: an Ode” were strongly shaped—nay, enabled—by the collaborative philosophical exchange with Wedgwood and Beddoes. Wedgwood, in particular, emerges as a key thinker in precipitating the self-reflexive accounts of the “shaping spirit of imagination” that Coleridge achieved in and by these poems.