In her memoir In Pursuit of Coleridge, Kathleen Coburn
remembered her first visit to the then Lord Coleridge in 1930. Lord
Geoffrey Coleridge (a descendant of Samuel Taylor’s elder brother James and
nephew John ‘Justice’ Coleridge) was less than enthusiastic about the memory of
his famous ancestor. Coburn recalled his somewhat intrepid response:
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| Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1795 |
Old Sam was only a poet, you know, never did anything practical that was any good to anybody, actually not thought much of in the family, a bit of a disgrace in fact, taking drugs and not looking after his wife and children. Of course STC must have been a wonderful man – in a way – he was somehow clever enough to take in so many great men – but why a young girl like you should spend your time on the old reprobate, I can’t think! All those badly-written scribblings – couldn’t even write a decent hand that ordinary people can read – full of stuff and nonsense. But all you pedants live on this sort of thing. Useless knowledge, perfectly useless. Now I at least know something about beef cattle...
Lord Geoffrey unwittingly encapsulated the trouble with his
great-great-uncle: simultaneously ‘a bit of a disgrace’ and a ‘wonderful man’, Samuel Taylor cannot be
an easy ancestor to bear the brand of. His surname could act as a powerful
talisman for the Coleridges who followed him. His daughter Sara suggested that
they would be of interest to posterity only as ‘psychological curiosities’, and
that is, perhaps, still where the interest begins, even if it is not where it
ends up. Literary agent Gill
Coleridge, a descendant of Lord Justice Coleridge, kindly spoke to me about
her experiences of her surname. ‘When she set us poetry to write for homework,
my English teacher used to say to me, ‘I shall expect something extra special
from you,’’ Gill remembered. ‘Of course, she completely put me off.’ Gill’s childhood experiences of the
expectations invoked by her surname recall Sara’s complicated responses to it;
because of her surname, Gill, too, became another Coleridgean ‘psychological
curiosity’, for her English teacher at least. ‘But it was not a curse,’ Gill is
careful to reiterate; for her and other family members it has been far more a
blessing than otherwise.
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| Lord John 'Justice' Coleridge |
Anthony Coleridge,
whose career titles are diverse enough to rival his polymathmatical ancestor’s,
includes in his Twitter description the titillating accolade ‘Poet Relation’,
and has blogged under the title ‘The
Proclamations of A Young Opium Eater’. Here, of course, the drug-taking
Samuel Taylor is invoked as a point of something like pride; Anthony, we can
assume from this title, has inherited the visionary, artistic side-effects
which allegedly resulted in poetic masterpieces like ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The
Pains of Sleep’. In the dual invocation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas
De Quincey, Anthony self-consciously styles himself as a modern Romantic,
moving through an artistic scene just as his ancestor did two-hundred years
ago.
Jacques Derrida suggested that a surname,
risks to bind, to enslave or to engage the other, to link the called, to call him/her to respond even before any decision or any deliberation, even before any freedom.
A surname – any surname – can trap the individual, can ‘bind’ them to a specific idea that is
constructed even before they are born; it is this nominal slavery that Sara and
Hartley Coleridge’s critics responded to; that, in the 1890s, responses to Mary
Elizabeth Coleridge continued; and that, well into the twentieth century, Gill Coleridge’s English teacher persisted in
maintaining. It is, then, other people who use the name as an
enslavement; for the bearers, it is a site of engagement, a place of recalling
and reinterpreting past associations of the name, and challenging them until
they become, once again, individual.
