Sunday 18 October 2015

John Bristed: the Alt-Coleridge


There are some remarkable parallels between the careers of John Bristed (you’ve never heard of him, but bear with me) and Coleridge. Coleridge was born in Devon in 1772; Bristed was born in Devon in 1778. Both men were the sons of a clergyman of the Established Church, and both flirted with Nonconformism in their youth—Coleridge with Unitarianism, Bristed with Quakerism—before settling in the Anglican church (Bristed was ordained in later life). In 1802-3 Bristed published The Adviser, or the Moral and Literary Tribunal in four volumes: a collection of essays ‘on topics of morals addressed to the youth of Great Britain’. Coleridge published The Friend 1809-10, later collected into three volumes, a collection of essays ‘to aid in the formation of fixed principles in politics, morals and religion’. Bristed also published a collection of Critical and Philosophical Essays in 1804, topics that Coleridge (of course) also often explored in print. It’s possible and even likely that the two men were aware of one another. Perhaps they even met, though I can't find any evidence they did (specifically, I wonder if Coleridge took The Adviser as his model for The Friend).

One reason to believe they didn't meet is that during Coleridge decades of higher profile, the 18-teens and 1820s, Bristed was no longer in the country. In 1806 he emigrated to America, something Coleridge had planned to do in 1795 but (of course) never actually managed. From then Bristed becomes an important name in New York, although his transatlantic life continues running in a weirdly parallel track to Coleridge—so, Bristed writes on politics and culture for newspapers and publishes books on those matters, just like Coleridge did; Bristed lectures to paying audiences on a wide variety of topics, just like Coleridge did (In 1814 was issued ‘a Prospectus of a series of courses of Lectures to be delivered by John Bristed’ in New York: four courses of at least fifty lectures each addressing ‘the principles of Metaphysics, History, Political Economy ... their application to National History, National Government, and to Eloquence, oral and written, [and] an elementary outline of the various legal codes of civilized nations’). Late in his life, Bristed published Thoughts on the Anglican and American-Anglo Churches (1822), just as late in his life Coleridge published On the Constitution of Church and State (1829). The difference here is that Bristed argued in favour of the voluntary system of American religious observance over the establishments of England, and Coleridge argued the exact opposite. Coleridge died in 1834; Bristed in 1855.

The main difference between the two men, of course, is that Coleridge was a genius and Bristed wasn’t. Still, Bristed lived a productive, fulfilled, successful life, married (happily it seems) to the daughter of a millionaire, and was widely respected in the nascent US; where Coleridge was unhappily married, so often miserable, alienated, drug-addicted and so on. I don't know. Which life would you rather have? Genius, underappreciated brilliance, misery, posthumous fame? Or worthy mediocrity, the respect of your contemporaries, happiness, posthumous obscurity? It's a tough call.

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