Samuel Taylor Coleridge

This case file contains two applications from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, now best known for his poetry (as the file title indicates), but also an important philosopher, public intellectual and periodical commentator. Coleridge applied in 1796 and 1816, when the Fund’s procedures were less bureaucratic than they would later become. Some documents had gone missing prior to Octavian Blewitt’s organising the Fund’s archive in the 1840s, meaning that this file is relatively brief.

James Martin, a banker and an independently minded Member of Parliament for Tewkesbury, was one of the Literary Fund’s eight original subscribers. Here he recommends Coleridge for aid due to his difficult family circumstances. Martin calls Coleridge both ‘a man of genius’ and ‘a man of undoubted talents’, although he notes that ‘his works have been unproductive’ and worries that ‘he is at present quite unprovided for, being of no profession.’

While Coleridge was at the beginning of his literary career when Martin intervened on his behalf, the Fund’s Committee evidently admired his work, voting him ten guineas to assist with his difficulties. Perhaps slightly uncomfortable receiving charity, Coleridge acknowledged the Fund’s aid rather ambivalently, asserting that the Committee should trust ‘that I feel what I ought to feel for this relief so liberally and delicately afforded’, but reassured them that ‘in happier circumstances I shall be proud to remember the Obligation’.

The initial letters from Coleridge’s 1816 application have not survived; in their place, the Fund’s Victorian secretary, Octavian Blewitt, has added a note copied from the Fund’s Minutes detailing their decision to award Coleridge £30. Blewitt has also clipped a later advertisement for Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection and other works.

The wealthy poet William Sotheby supported Coleridge’s 1816 application; here, he writes to James Anderson, a member of the Fund’s Committee, to thank him for the Fund’s ‘speedy compliance’.

Sotheby also sent a more formal note to the Committee, confirming that he had received the money voted to Coleridge from the hands of the Fund’s founder, David Williams. 1816 was one of Coleridge’s lowest points as he fell into depression and his opium addiction worsened. It is possible that the Fund had arranged for Sotheby to administer the grant to ensure its judicious use.

Octavian Blewitt was a diligent collector of materials relating to Fund applicants, often adding relevant newspaper clippings to case files. Here, he has collected a letter to The Times in which Coleridge’s son Derwent denies that his father received charitable aid. Literary Fund applications were confidential, and Blewitt would have seen no reason to correct Derwent publicly, but it is clear he wanted to record the contradiction in the Fund’s archive.