De Quincey's Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets, as David Wright in his introduction to the Penguin edition notes, ‘is a curiously amorphous literary classic. There is no generally agreed title or canon. Not only does the text of different editions vary, but so does the contents-list’ (W, p. 26). The collection and popular publication of the ‘Lake papers’ from the ongoing politico-literary reminiscing indulged by De Quincey in Tait's represents a selective editorial process supposedly initiated by De Quincey in the second volume of his Selections Grave and Gay. Yet De Quincey's ‘edition’ of these papers places them in conjunction with such new work as the reminiscential essays on ‘Laxton’ and ‘The Priory’, and the first two volumes of Selections are simply entitled Autobiographic Sketches. Wright's ‘completion’ of the editorial task he perceives De Quincey to have commenced is based on a contentious recognition that ‘the true theme of the Recollections is the dialogue between Wordsworth and De Quincey’ (W, p. 27). The implicit separation between the literary and political realms in the establishment of this ‘classic’ may be seen to influence our understanding of De Quincey's relations with Coleridge and Wordsworth. This has resulted in our critical tendency to view De Quincey's relations with Wordsworth and Coleridge in somewhat detached ‘literary’ and formal terms. In the following chapter, I will attempt to describe De Quincey's theoretical grounding as political journalist in terms of a Coleridgean influence derived from the latter's ‘radical’ past as well as his later conservative rationalisations and suppressions of that past. Such a procedure may serve, I hope, as a step towards the larger restoration of political significance to their relationship that is integral to this study.

In his work on the radical phase of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Nicholas Roe has pointed out an important difference between the ways in which Wordsworth and Coleridge dealt in later life with their earlier commitments to the French Revolution: