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Scholarly interest in the print culture of the Romantic era has grown in recent years, with two new collections of essays, British Romanticism and the Edinburgh Review and Romantic Periodicals and Print Culture, building on a platform of research established in seminal works such as Jon Klancher's The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832 and Kevin Gilmartin's Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England. Yet despite the fact that Samuel Taylor Coleridge's writing life provides fertile ground for reconsidering the role of journalism in the Romantic period's formulation of authorship and literary value, little attention has been paid to his long career as a journalist. None of the other canonical Romantic poets had such close links with the press, nor such a vexed attitude towards the relationship between journalism and literature. As Richard Holmes has noted, Coleridge's career as a man of letters seems to have occurred "almost against his will" (176). He wrote for the daily newspapers sporadically for two decades as well as producing two periodicals of his own, yet he might be regarded as the champion of literature's superiority over the newspaper and magazine press. How are such contradictions of genre and profession to be reconciled? And what does Coleridge's dual role as a canonical poet and a hack journalist tell us about the stakes of print culture in a period when increasing newspaper sales potentially threatened to erode literature's audience? (1)
In his comprehensive introduction to Essays on His Times, David Erdman notes that the life of a newspaper journalist was always "more or less" a familiar life to Coleridge (lxvii). If it is possible to hit the nail on the head by way of an equivocation, then that is what Erdman achieves in this passing remark. Coleridge was indeed always more or less a journalist, but this statement is not the throwaway assessment it appears to be. It is in fact an apt description of the finely calibrated way in which Coleridge measured journalism, both as a genre and as a profession. On the scales of literary accomplishment, he was always furiously adding and subtracting small measures or heavy weights in order to appear, as need dictated, more or less a journalist. (2)
This constant balancing act has meant that scholars have struggled to take an accurate measure of his journalistic career. In an important piece of research Zachary Leader signals refreshingly in his title, "Coleridge and the Uses of Journalism," that journalism might have had productive and identifiable effects on the poet's work and on the Romantic canon. Leader's excellent essay draws extensively on Coleridge's many ambivalent remarks about journalism but does not engage in sufficient detail with that ambivalence as a critical problem, reading the remarks instead as an indication that serving as a journalist was "hardly a source of pride, let alone an ambition" (26). Leader's argument thus tends to interpret ambivalence more as a manifestation of negativity than as a sign of a contest over writing and authorship that occurred in the Romantic period and that has particular significance for Coleridge's reputation. Deirdre Coleman's recent chapter on the journalism in the Cambridge Companion to Coleridge provides a detailed and succinct overview of this aspect of Coleridge's career but touches only briefly on the question of his attitude to the profession and the genre (127-28), and it is primarily focused on his work for his own periodicals, The Watchman and The Friend, rather than his work for the daily press. The full scope of Coleridge's changing attitude towards journalism needs to be examined more closely as it forms a kind of double life; wholeheartedly dedicated to his marriage with literature, he also pursued a romance with the press, constantly reformulating his writing career and his literary reputation around journalism and positioning himself as an artist in a marketplace that was also re-evaluating the nature of authorship and artistry.
Coleridge was an active participant in these negotiations because of the length of his journalistic career and because his own work could be located at different points on the textual spectrum that ranged from literature to reportage. His life as a journalist began in 1796 with The Watchman, a periodical he founded and published in Bristol that contained a range of original and reprinted material. In 1797 he commenced a longstanding relationship with the editor Daniel Stuart, contributing a small selection of pieces to Stuart's Morning Post in 1798 and then moving to London to work as a regular correspondent in 1799. He left London in 1800 but returned in late 1801 and afterwards continued to send pieces to Stuart, including important articles on the Peace of Amiens. When Stuart sold the Morning Post in 1803 to concentrate on his evening paper, the Courier, Coleridge followed and made sporadic contributions in 1803-1804. His long series "Letters on the Spaniards" appeared in December 1809, the same year that he began publishing the literary and philosophical periodical The Friend. Coleridge provided writing for the Courier until 1818, despite strong misgivings about the paper's politics and the editor T. G. Street's pro-Government editorial stance, with particularly intense periods of work in 1811, 1814 and 1817. He was thus a key witness to developments and opportunities in the periodical and daily press in the early Romantic period, acting as editor, contributor and collaborator.
While this brief chronology suggests a consistent engagement with journalism, Coleridge's career as a journalist can be divided into three distinct phases in which his ambivalence towards the daily press was shaped by different factors and manifested in different ways. The first period, which lasted from the founding of The Watchman in 1796 through to his departure for Malta in 1804, is characterized by an anxious interaction with the daily press that led Coleridge to oscillate between embracing and disdaining the opportunities journalism presented. The second phase, which includes the establishment of The Friend and his return to daily journalism for the Courier, shows Coleridge's attempts to succeed in what he perceived to be a broad and eclectic textual marketplace, producing works of journalism as part of an ongoing creative interaction with Wordsworth and his oeuvre. This phase might be said to be characterized by a modified version of the "lyrical dialogue" described by Paul Magnuson, a dialogue that saw Coleridge respond to his friend's work through his journalism. The final phase, from 1814 onwards, saw Coleridge trying to reinvent his career retrospectively with journalism at its center. At all times, however, newspaper journalism formed a vital part of his work that has largely dropped out of sight in critical evaluations of his writing life.
Even at the earliest stage of his career, the role that journalism might play in a wider literary life interested Coleridge. His first periodical endeavor, The Watchman, was clearly designed to navigate between the transience of journalism and the longevity of literature. As Coleman has observed, "the emphasis on the daily-ness and immediacy...
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