Hartley Coleridge
Hartley Coleridge was the eldest son of the renowned Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and was named after the philosopher David Hartley. Often regarded as a precocious child, he was the inspiration for several of his father's poems, including "The Nightingale" and "Frost at Midnight." Despite early expectations of poetic greatness, Hartley's literary career did not reach the heights anticipated by his family and peers. He experienced a challenging upbringing, particularly after his parents' separation, which led him to be raised by poet Robert Southey and his family.
Hartley attended Oxford University, where he demonstrated academic promise but eventually lost a fellowship due to behavioral issues, including excessive drinking and missed obligations. Following this setback, he struggled as a hack journalist and faced difficulties in maintaining teaching positions. In the 1830s, he shifted to writing biographies of notable figures in Yorkshire and Lancashire. Hartley settled in Grasmere in the Lake District, where he lived a reclusive life focused on writing, producing a modest body of work that included "Poems, Songs, and Sonnets" in 1833. He passed away in 1849, with much of his writing remaining unpublished during his lifetime.
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Hartley Coleridge
Poet
- Born: September 19, 1796
- Birthplace: Kingsdown, Bristol, England
- Died: 1849
Biography
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, noted Romantic poet and critic, named his eldest son, David Hartley Coleridge, after the philosopher David Hartley and made him the subject of two of his poems, “The Nightingale” and “Frost at Midnight.” Hartley was also featured in his father’s “Christabel” and “To H. C., Six Years Old,” and was the child of Nature and the spirit of the “philosophic mind” in William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” All of the above-mentioned poems had been published by the time he was eleven years old. The epitome of the precocious child, he never achieved the poetic greatness that his father and his associates projected for him.
The Coleridge home was not a happy one, but Samuel Taylor Coleridge was very fond of Hartley, who was the only Coleridge child to accompany his father and the Wordsworth family to London and Coleorton in 1807. The six months the two Coleridges spent together were the best years of Hartley’s life. Shortly after 1807, Coleridge and his wife, Sara Fricker Coleridge, separated, and Hartley saw little of his famous father thereafter. After the separation, Hartley returned to Greta Hall, where he was raised by poet Robert Southey and his family. After an education at Mr. Dawes’s Academy at Ambleside, he was admitted in May of 1815, through the help of Southey and his friends, to Oxford University, where he had a successful academic career, although he received a second-class degree.
His academic promise was such that he was awarded a fellowship at staid Oriel College. To get a lifelong position at Oriel, the young Coleridge had only to complete a year-long probation, which amounted to six months in residence at Oriel. However, his “intemperate” behavior, which consisted of drinking, missing chapel, and failing to deliver required lectures, cost him the fellowship in 1820. Not even the intervention of his father and Southey, who both had botched their university academic careers, could restore the fellowship.
The loss of the fellowship was catastrophic to Coleridge, who spent the next two years of his life as a hack journalist and heavy drinker before returning to the Lake District in 1822. His position back at Ambleside was terminated when he could not control the pupils under his supervision, and he moved to Leeds, where he contracted to write biographies of important people in Yorkshire and Lancashire. After their initial publication, the biographies were twice printed in the 1830’s by other publishers under the titles Biographia Borealis and Worthies of Yorkshire and Lancashire.
In 1833, Coleridge left Leeds for Grasmere in the Lake District, where he lived for the rest of his life with Mrs. Fleming, his landlady, and her successors. Except for an administrative position at a school in Sedbergh during 1837-1838, he spent his time wandering and writing. His Poems, Songs, and Sonnets appeared in 1833, and he edited the plays and provided biographies of Philip Massinger and John Ford in 1840, but most of his work, some ninety volumes, did not see print. His younger brother Derwent, who looked after him while he was dying of complications from bronchitis in 1849, later edited his verse and his prose in 1851.