This book examines the development of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's intellectual legacy in Britain and America from 1834 to 1934 by focusing on his late role as the Sage of Highgate and his programme of educating young minds who were destined for the higher professions (particularly preaching and teaching). Chapters assess his pedagogy and his late publications, his posthumous reputation, and his influence on aesthetics, theology, philosophy, politics and social reform. The book discusses a wide range of British and American intellectuals, including Thomas and Matthew Arnold, F. D. Maurice, John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, Shadworth Hodgson, T. H. Green, James Marsh, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Bushnell, William James and John Dewey. It demonstrates how Coleridgean ideas were developed and distorted into something he would never have recognized as his own and emphasizes his significance as a catalyst who played a vital role in shaping the intellectual vocation of the long nineteenth century.
"The Coleridge Legacy is the sort of book you read in graduate school and find overwhelming and a bit confusing, but when you come back to it years later you are grateful to discover a guide to what you had elsewhere read in a thousand places but never quite managed to put together. ... they certainly provide insights towards a fuller portrait of one of the most complex figures of the Romantic period." (Jeffrey W. Barbeau, European Romantic Review, Vol. 32 (1), February, 2021)
"The Coleridge Legacy, is ambitious both in scope and perspective; it traces Coleridgean ideas across the Atlantic Ocean from England to America during a one hundred-year timespan. ... The book thereby manages a balance, restraint, and delicacy difficult to achieve in the labyrinthine world of Coleridge studies. It also helps to rehabilitate the figure of Coleridge as a steady and important shaping force in the resultant philosophical / educational systems of Britain and America in the one-hundred years following his death." (Dometa Brothers, The Coleridge Bulletin, Issue 54, 2019)
"The Coleridge Legacy, is ambitious both in scope and perspective; it traces Coleridgean ideas across the Atlantic Ocean from England to America during a one hundred-year timespan. ... The book thereby manages a balance, restraint, and delicacy difficult to achieve in the labyrinthine world of Coleridge studies. It also helps to rehabilitate the figure of Coleridge as a steady and important shaping force in the resultant philosophical / educational systems of Britain and America in the one-hundred years following his death." (Dometa Brothers, The Coleridge Bulletin, Issue 54, 2019)