Unofficial Christ's Hospital Forum

Having been in Coleridge B in the Puritan, pre Beatles 1950s (and before the girls moved in) I've often wondered if there's a definitive biography of Samuel Taylor. I believe that he was the son of a West Country clergyman, was beaten by the appalling Rev Boyer at CH, endorsed the revolution in France and escaped just in time to avoid the reign of terror, then moved to the Lake District to become part of the Lakes romantic poet movement where he was suffering a back problem and a laudanam (morphine derivative) habit to dull the pain. As I've detailed elsewhere he made the first properly descriptive Lakes rock climbing expedition (a descent actually of Broad Stand which lies between Scafell and Scafell Pike) and also of course produced epic imaginative works like Kublai Khan and The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner. These works are bracingly bizarre and trippy and seem to me to be the product of a mind that had delved into a subconscious later explored by De Quincey, Huxley and Burroughs. Could it be that CH played its part in predicting the whole mind-bending, consciousness-expanding era of the 1960s? There must be some OB literary wonks out there, or indeed some OB psychology wonks, who can expand our knowledge of Samuel Taylor.

Going through Google I put in "Laudanum in Lakeland" and discovered that many people in the Coleridge/Wordsworth family group were knocking back the tincture of Laudanum since it was the popular analgesic of the day for all ills, painkilling medicine not being so advanced then. Since it's also a product of opium which De Quincey wrote about one imagines that Coleridge may have found inspiration too. After the poor man survived CH one hopes that he was rewarded in later life with some good trips.

Not sure about your history. ISTR he became tutor to the child of a woman living at Trereife, Penzance and eventually married her. Their descendents, the le Grice family, still own the house; I knew them all well and have stayed at the house. . When I was young the father was the Lord Lieutenant of Cornwall. He had four children, the youngest, Val(entine) le Grice, a solicitor, was behind the calls to stop Charles' bid to marry a divorcee. My last contact Trereife was a B & B.

Please SCRAP that last post; I was thinking of a friend of S T Coleridge