The Vocation of Sara Coleridge

Authorship and Religion

Robin Schofield

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319703701
• eBook ISBN: 9783319703718
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

This book presents a fundamental reassessment of Sara Coleridge. It examines her achievements as an author in the public sphere, and celebrates her interventions in what was a masculine genre of religious polemics. Sara Coleridge the religious author was the peer of such major figures as John Henry Newman and F. D. Maurice, and recognized as such by contemporaries. Her strategic negotiations with conventions of gender and authorship were subtle and successful. In this rediscovery of Sara Coleridge the author revises perspectives upon her literary relationship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Far from sacrificing her opportunities in service of her father's memory, her rationale is to exploit his metaphysics in original religious writings that engage with urgent controversies of her own times. Sara Coleridge critiques the Oxford theology of Newman and his colleagues for authoritarian and elitist tendencies, and for creating a negative culture in religious discourse. In response, she experiments with methodologies of collaborative, dialogic exchange, in which form as much as content will promote liberal, inclusive and productive encounters. She develops this agenda in her major religious work, the unpublished Dialogues on Regeneration (1850–51), which this book examines in its penultimate chapter.

© The Author(s) 2018

Robin SchofieldThe Vocation of Sara Coleridgehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70371-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Sara Coleridge and the Contexts of Authorship

Robin Schofield¹

(1)

Oxford, UK

End Abstract

Innovation and Subversion

In her final religious works, the unpublished Dialogues on Regeneration (1850–51), Sara Coleridge rejects the monologic medium of the essay for the polyphonic form of dialogue . This extract, from the beginning of a scene, suggests the subtle flexibility of dialogue in a religious context:

Irenia:

How is it, Mr Thychnesse, that you have quite deserted our colloquies on the New Birth, you who used to be so warm and confident a defender of the Catholic tenet?

Mr Thychnesse:

The Catholic tenet, my dear Miss Marvell, needs no defender, and to say the truth, debate has its limits. There are people that can be convinced and people that can’t be convinced. If it is mere waste to wash an ass’s head with soap, to spend eau de Cologne on it is still more wasteful.

Una:

Well, though the ass may not be much brighter, yet the atmosphere cannot but be refreshed by the odiferous operation.

Thychnesse:

For myself the discussion was quite superfluous. I have studied the subject of regeneration thoroughly—thoroughly—and had placed my faith in it on the strongest possible basis.

Irenia:

You used to say that no faith is sure but that which is implicit.

Thychnesse:

And so I say still. All stable genuine faith is that which is taken in with childlike simplicity and humility from our spiritual superiors.

Irenia:

Then why did you take such pains to study the question, if study is not the way to a knowledge of the truth?

Thychnesse:

I studied the subject of regeneration not in order to discover the truth but that I may be able to defend it against its enemies. Yes, my dear young lady, I obtained in this way the sharp sword of Inspired Scripture. I armed myself with the breastplate of authority and held before me the sevenfold shield of theological divinity. Sevenfold do I say? Seventy and seven strong hides for my buckler were fastened by that cloud of witnesses. You may smile, Miss Una, but I can tell you that this is no exaggeration. Seventy seven is under the mark. Hundreds of pious and learned divines testify to the truth that Baptism is regeneration. Why the very heathen called Baptism a regeneration!

Una:

But the heathen could only have meant that it symbolized change of mind and life. (HRC)

Sara presents an egalitarian model of discourse in which dialogue collapses hierarchical distinctions. Informal conversation enables the two women to encounter their male interlocutor on equal terms. Although Mr Thychnesse adopts a pompous style (‘my dear young lady’, ‘thoroughly – thoroughly’) that seeks to maintain patriarchal dominance, the women are clearly and subversively in charge.

As the scene progresses, Una and Irenia draw out Mr Thychnesse to express himself with increasing absurdity; Una can barely contain her mirth at his absurd, quasi-biblical hyperboles. The comic theatricality of the scene, which satirizes Thychnesse’s unreflecting acceptance of the authority of ‘our spiritual superiors’, recalls Molière’s Tartuffe, in which the maid Dorine exposes her master Orgon’s ludicrous self-delusions. Underlying Sara’s comedy is her ongoing critique of the Oxford theology, which conceives of discourse in monologic, authoritarian terms, its dogmatic purpose to ‘convince’, rather than to collaborate and explore. Its exponents, therefore, reject engagement in dialogue , expressed by Thychnesse’s ludicrous trope of wasting perfume on a donkey. As this brief glimpse suggests , Sara’s Dialogues on Regeneration are characterized by literary innovation, genial humour, linguistic vitality and a subversion of gender conventions. Such qualities serve Sara’s radical commitment to religious inclusivity. These pioneering works will be explored in Chap. 6.

The term ‘vocation’ in my title refers to Sara’s dedicated commitment to religious authorship in the final decade of her life, in which she perpetrates a subtly radical subversion of Victorian gender codes. In addition, ‘vocation’ carries the more general sense of ‘an occupation’ or ‘profession’ (OED). In using the term, I am influenced by Elaine Showalter , who observes: ‘Victorian women were not accustomed to choosing a vocation ; womanhood was a vocation in itself.’¹ From late 1837, when Sara embarked upon her first original religious work, to November 1851, six months before her death, when she completed the Dialogues on Regeneration, she flouted convention by ‘choosing’ her ‘vocation’ (in the sense of an ‘occupation’ in the public sphere). Furthermore, the interlinking strands of her work, as STC’s editor and as religious author, were dedicated, with a Miltonic sense of purpose, to the causes of religious liberty and spiritual devotion. Ultimately, as this study will show, Sara’s public vocation and domestic concerns, as widow and single parent, would coalesce.

It might reasonably be objected that, across Sara’s literary life as a whole, her engagements were varied and occasional, and lacked the unified focus of a vocational commitment. Undeniably, the first two decades of Sara’s writing life, up to late 1837, do not reflect the single-minded drive of her contemporary Elizabeth Barrett , for example, who, according to biographer Margaret Forster, by the age of twenty-one ‘considered [herself] irrevocably set upon [her] future course [as] a poet’, and for whom writing was already a ‘serious … business’, demanding wholehearted, unconditional commitment.² I contend in this study that Sara develops in purposeful focus through her writing career, and that, in the closing decade of her life, her profound and sustained engagement in religious polemics intensifies into a devotional calling. In her ‘Introduction’ to Biographia 1847, she characterizes STC’s ‘vocation’ in terms that apply to the mature phase of her own writing life. His ‘vocation’, she contends, was ‘to examine the truth of modes of thought’, and ‘to defend the Holy Faith by developing it and shewing its accordance and identity with the ideas of reason’ (Biographia 1847, I, p. lxii, p. lxv). As this study will show, Sara pursues a similar ‘vocation’ as religious philosopher in her responses to the politico-theological disruptions of her times. In doing so, she undermines decisively the masculine domain of academic theology.

‘[T]he Thoroughness of [Southey’s] Instruction’: Sara Coleridge’s Formative Context

Sara Coleridge is a neglected figure in literary history. She was born in December 1802, and died prematurely of cancer in May 1852, aged forty-nine. She had two surviving elder brothers: Hartley, born in 1796, and Derwent, born in 1800. Her father, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was absent for much of her childhood and adolescence, during which her parents lived together for ‘less than two years’ (Mudge, p. 19). For more than a decade, between April 1812 and January 1823, Sara never saw her father. She grew up in the household of her uncle, Robert Southey, at Greta Hall , Keswick, in which she was born. She and her mother lived there as Southey’s dependants until Sara’s marriage to her cousin, Henry Nelson Coleridge, in 1829. Southey developed a close friendship with the Wordsworths, with whom the Coleridge family already had intimate connections. Southey and Wordsworth were Sara’s paternal influences in moral and intellectual terms, as she explains in the final year of her life:

I knew dear Mr. Wordsworth perhaps as well as I have ever known any one in the world – more intimately than I knew my father, and as intimately as I knew my Uncle Southey … [M]y mind and turn of thought were gradually moulded by [Wordsworth’s] conversation, and the influences under which I was brought by his means in matters of intellect, while in those which concerned the heart and the moral being I was still more deeply and importantly indebted to the character and daily conduct of my admirable Uncle Southey. (Criticism, p. 96)

Relative to the common experience of middle-class women in the early nineteenth century, Sara received a remarkably advanced education. The home schooling for the children of Greta Hall was systematic and followed a regular timetable. Sara’s aunts, mother and Southey were the teachers. As Kenneth Curry remarks, ‘[t]he scholarship of Sara Coleridge … is evidence of the thoroughness of [Southey’s] instruction’.³ Southey told Unitarian minister John Estlin that she ‘has received an education here at home which would astonish you’ (Mudge, p. 22). Sara benefited also from the use of Southey’s extraordinary library, which contained ‘the impressive total of 14,000 books’ (Curry, p. 45). De Quincey observes that the library ‘was placed at the service of all the ladies’.⁴ Sara benefited conspicuously from Southey’s scholarship and generosity. As I will show, he was a significant influence upon her literary career. Like him, she would become a writer of politico-religious polemic, and would revisit topics on which he had written, such as Methodism . Southey’s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Sara Coleridge and the Contexts of Authorship
• 2. Towards a Vocation of Religious Authorship: Collaboration and Dialogue, 1818–1837
• 3. ‘On Rationalism’: ‘The Authoritative Word’ and ‘Liberty of Conscience’
• 4.  Biographia 1847: Plagiarism, Literary Property and Dialogic Authorship
• 5. The Theory and Practice of Polemical Writing: Religious Authorship, 1847–1849
• 6. Authorial Vocation and Literary Innovation, 1850–1851
• 7. Conclusion: Public Renewal, Personal Redemption
• Back Matter