Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Frequently cited texts
- Epigraph
- Introduction
- 1 “True Principles of Religion and Liberty”: liberal Dissent and the Warrington Academy
- 2 Anna Barbauld and devotional tastes: extempore, particular, experimental
- 3 The “Joineriana”: Barbauld, the Aikin family circle, and the Dissenting public sphere
- 4 Godwinian scenes and popular politics: Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and the legacies of Dissent
- 5 “Properer for a Sermon”: Coleridgean ministries
- 6 “A Saracenic mosque, not a Quaker meeting-house”: Southey's Thalaba, Islam, and religious nonconformity
- 7 Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM
5 - “Properer for a Sermon”: Coleridgean ministries
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Frequently cited texts
- Epigraph
- Introduction
- 1 “True Principles of Religion and Liberty”: liberal Dissent and the Warrington Academy
- 2 Anna Barbauld and devotional tastes: extempore, particular, experimental
- 3 The “Joineriana”: Barbauld, the Aikin family circle, and the Dissenting public sphere
- 4 Godwinian scenes and popular politics: Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and the legacies of Dissent
- 5 “Properer for a Sermon”: Coleridgean ministries
- 6 “A Saracenic mosque, not a Quaker meeting-house”: Southey's Thalaba, Islam, and religious nonconformity
- 7 Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM
Summary
Acquainted in some way with nearly every contemporary figure mentioned in this book, Samuel Taylor Coleridge presents a rewarding case for the study of early Romantic religious Dissent and dissident publicity. From Cambridge in 1794 to his departure for Germany in 1798, Coleridge's Unitarianism informed his fundamental conceptions of community first in the Pantisocracy scheme, the Bristol lectures, and The Watchman and then, most enduringly, in the experimental conversation poems which followed. Religious Dissent, however, has too uniformly been applied as a primary context for Coleridge's early development. His Unitarian nonconformity, on the contrary, needs to be understood as in important ways opposed to the public sphere of heterodox Dissenters presented in this study. The public in which Coleridge's radically egalitarian forms of communication would take place developed both within and against the middle-class Dissenting culture opened to Coleridge by his Unitarian beliefs, writings, and oratory.
Throughout the first half of the eighteenth century “old Dissent” comprised the three major denominations of Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists, but by the end of the century Unitarianism and “new Dissent,” Methodism, had augmented the ranks of nonconformity. The Evangelical Revival, furthermore, was beginning to spread from Methodism, especially from Calvinistic Methodism, as well as from Evangelical elements within the Church of England, to energize the older denominations, the orthodox branches in particular.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent , pp. 119 - 151Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007