Radical Bible: Coleridge’s 1790s West Country Politics

Abstract

Connections between Protestant Dissent and early expressions of Romanticism in England have been the focus of some important recent work in Romantic studies. Research on the periodicals founded or edited by Dissenters, the Joseph Johnson circle, the Warrington Academy circle, the Essex Street Unitarian Chapel, and prominent Dissenters such as Joseph Priestley, Richard Price, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and others, has contributed a clearer picture of the extraordinarily active ‘Dissenting’ milieu within which the young S. T. Coleridge, and the writers with whom he established close friendships and often collaborated — Robert Southey, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, Charles Lloyd — formed such crucial relationships.¹ Research on radical politics in this period has also been greatly enriched by the work of cultural-materialist and new historicist scholars. In particular, cultural-materialist and new historicist critics, developing lines of enquiry first opened up by E. P. Thompson, have increasingly recognised the great diversity of the radical writing and political activity that took place in the years immediately following the French Revolution.² Noting this trend in historical scholarship, Marcus Wood in 1994 remarked on how it revealed ‘the diversity of the social, intellectual, and geographical histories of radical organizations and individuals’ (Radical Satire, 63).