Hartley Coleridge

Hartley Coleridge , 1796-1849, English author; eldest son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Reared in the household of the poet Southey after the estrangement of his parents, Hartley Coleridge went to Oxford and gained a fellowship at Oriel. His shy and melancholy nature, however, curtailed a very promising university career. He was dismissed from Oriel for intemperance and went to London. There he wrote and tutored private pupils. His Biographia Borealis, a series of very sound critical biographies, appeared in 1833. The same year he published a small volume of poems, including some beautiful sonnets, which established his literary reputation. Shortly thereafter, he retired to the Lake District, where he remained until his death. In 1840 he edited the dramatic works of Massinger and Ford. His brother Derwent published the remainder of his literary works in 1851.

Bibliography: See his letters (ed. by E. L. Griggs and G. E. Griggs, 1936); biography by L. Hanson (1939, repr. 1962).

Coleridge, Hartley (1796–1849), eldest son of S. T. Coleridge. He lost his Oxford fellow-ship for intemperance. In 1833 he published Poems, Songs and Sonnets and his unfinished Biographia Borealis, retitled Worthies of Yorkshire and Lancashire in 1836. He contributed to Blackwood's Magazine, the London Magazine, and other journals. His Essays and Marginalia (1851) were edited by his brother Derwent. He is the subject of two important poems by his father, ‘Frost at Midnight’ and ‘The Nightingale’.