In search of justice: Blake, Coleridge and the romantic conflict between legal and literary discourse (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake)

This project explores the relationship between legal and literary discourse in England in the period 1790 to 1832. I claim that two Romantic authors, William Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, propose certain literary genres and institutions as revitalizing legal institutions they, and many within British culture, perceived as failing or defunct. Blake and Coleridge see in artistic expression the potential fulfillment of a concept of justice that had, at least in the of the English legal system, began as the underpinning of law and been transmitted and transformed over hundreds of years, only to languish in a corrupt Chancery "equity," a bribed and influenced Parliament, and a jury system under siege from conservative government ideology. Although early in their respective careers, each author theorizes literary production as occurring in a sphere hermetically separate from the legal realm, each also picks up and translates particular legal mechanisms into literary terms. While Blake draws on lawful and cultural notions of insanity to construe prophecy as incapable of expressing any coherent intent in jurisprudential terms, Coleridge finds a similarly-efficacious deferral of authorial agency in Mosaic law and his encapsulation of it in lyric form. The tradition of pious perjury then serves Blake as template for the concept of reading as redemption---judgment, whether enacted in the literary or legal sphere, inevitably reveals the piety or profanity of the judge. For his part, Coleridge sees in extant legal organizational forms, namely the corporation and trust, models for institutionalizing a system of shared values to replace the common law. In translating these legal concepts into literary terms, both Blake and Coleridge perform an authorial office each hopes will reintegrate their brand of literary justice back into public space to supplant the empty legal manifestations of justice both decry.