Author: Coleridge, Hartley
Biography:
COLERIDGE, Hartley (1796-1849: ODNB)
The eldest son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (q.v.) and his wife Sara Fricker, he was born on 19 Sept. 1796 in Westbury, Bristol, Gloucestershire, and was named David Hartley—later shortened to Hartley—in honour of his father’s then favourite philosopher. His parents having been Unitarian dissenters at the time, his birth was later registered at Dr. Williams’s Library (on 30 Sept. 1813). He grew up in the household of Coleridges and Southeys (q.v.) at Greta Hall in Keswick, Cumberland, with the Wordsworths (q.v.) as close friends and neighbours. From schools in Keswick and Ambleside he went up to Oxford (matric. New Inn Hall 1815, BA Merton 1819), and was given a fellowship at Oriel College (1819-20). In 1820, however, the fellowship was not renewed. The reasons given were disorderly conduct and drunkenness. This failure set a pattern for Hartley’s life, and he struggled to earn a living thereafter. He first moved to London to work as a freelance writer with contributions to magazines such as Blackwood’s. Returning to the Lakes, he taught at his old school in Ambleside until it closed in 1826, and then continued his essay-writing, developing the persona of the “Old Bachelor.” In a productive phase in the 1830s he moved to Leeds to work on commission for a publisher who went bankrupt, but the result was his Biographia Borealis (1833), several times reprinted. In the same year appeared the first and only volume of his Poems, dedicated to his father. When S. T. Coleridge died in 1834 his will named three trustees to manage a fund intended to ensure that Hartley always had a home to live in and freedom of choice as to its location. He taught school again for a time in Yorkshire but returned finally to Grasmere, where he did find a home with a farming family for the rest of his life, which he spent on various literary projects and occasional lecturing. He remained unmarried. In the 1841 Census he gave his occupation as “Writer.” He died of bronchitis on 6 Jan. 1849 and was buried in Grasmere churchyard on 11 Jan. His younger brother Derwent undertook the publication of his literary remains: Poems in two vols., with a memoir (1851); Essays and Marginalia (two vols, 1851); and Lives of Northern Worthies (1852). (ODNB 20 Sept. 2023; ancestry.com 20 Sept. 2023; Alumni Oxonienses; S. T. Coleridge, Letters 5 [1971], 57-78) HJ