Samual_Taylor_Colleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire The son of the Reverend John Coleridge, and Ann Bowdon, the daughter of a farmer. At the time of his birth, Coleridge's father was already fifty-three years old, Ann, his second wife, was forty-five. Coleridge, the youngest of ten children, was adored by his parents. Later Coleridge described his childhood as full fantasy: "At six years old I remember to have read Belisarius, Robinson Crusoe, and Philip Quarll – and then I found the Arabian Nights' entertainments – one tale of which (the tale of a man who was compelled to seek for a pure virgin) made so deep an impression on me (I had read it in the evening while my mother was mending stockings) that I was haunted by spectres whenever I was in the dark – and I distinctly remember the anxious and fearful e agerness with which I used to watch the window in which the books lay - and whenever the sun lay upon them, I would seize it, carry it by the wall, and bask, and read." After his father's death, Coleridge was sent away to Christ's Hospital School in London. Coleridge studied at Jesus College. He joined in the reformist movement stimulated by the French Revolution, and abandoned his studies in 1793. In desperation, after an unhappy love-affair and pressed by debt, he enlisted in the 15th Light Dragoons under the name of Silas Tomkin Comberbache. Soon he realized that he was unfit for an army career and he was brought out under 'insanity' clause by his brother, Captain James Coleridge. In Cambridge Coleridge met the radical, future poet laureate Robert Southey (1774-1843) in 1794. Coleridge moved with him to Bristol to establish a community, but the plan failed.