Coleridge, Priestley, and the culture of Unitarian Dissent (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Joseph Priestley)

Scholarly work on Samuel Taylor Coleridge often acknowledges that he passed through a Unitarian phase early in his career, but it generally underestimates the extent to which his Unitarian involvement influenced his work in the 1790s. While studies have treated aspects of his Unitarianism indirectly by way of other critical foci, such as his early political radicalism, or the genealogy of his theological thought, or his flirtations with pantheism, etc., no one has undertaken a systematic inquiry that puts Unitarianism at its center. This study, therefore, seeks to demonstrate that the central tenets of Coleridge's early thought were steeped in the religious heterodoxy and political radicalism of Unitarian Dissent, especially as formulated by Joseph Priestley, its most influential theorist and most infamous icon, and that Coleridge's expression of these beliefs was significantly shaped by the persecution that non-conformists experienced in England subsequent to the outbreak of the French Revolution. I argue that we are prone to misunderstanding Coleridge's work if we fail to recognize the Dissenting tradition to which he repeatedly turned as a source of intellectual inspiration and practical support, and if we overlook how his writings responded to the pressures exerted upon Unitarians by the British government, the established clergy, and society at large. My study thus seeks to demonstrate that Coleridge's engagement with Priestleyan Unitarianism forms a key index for understanding his literary practice in the formative period of 1794-8.