Coleridge and Opium - Coleridge in Highgate

Coleridge in Highgate

In April 1816 Coleridge's friend and physician, Joseph Adams, put him in touch with a Highgate doctor named James Gillman with the intention of placing Coleridge in his full-time care and effect a cure to his addiction problems. Although Gillman initially had no intention of taking this stranger into his household, he was so charmed by the poet on their first meeting that he agreed to take him in and attempt a cure. Coleridge spent most of the rest of his life in the Gillman house with only brief periods away. James Gillman was ahead of his time as a physician of addiction and although he was never able to entirely stop Coleridge’s intake of opium, he managed to bring it under greater control for many years. It is surely to Gillman’s treatment and friendship that we owe much of Coleridge’s later prose works, particularly his Biographia Literaria, Lay Sermons, and Opus Maximum.

Coleridge virtually became a member of the Gillman family and even accompanied them on annual vacations. On a number of occasions when Coleridge was away from the Gillman household, he fell back into excessive opium use. Each time Gillman managed to step in and return Coleridge to his home and to controlled, less harmful opium dosages. The pharmacy where the poet obtained his prescribed supply (and sometimes, an illicit addition to it) still exists in the High Street, though moved a few dozen yards from the original premises. Gillman later became one of the great champions of Coleridge’s reputation and commonly defended his friend in polite society and in print with one of the earliest biographies of Coleridge. Coleridge’s reputation was somewhat restored during his years at Highgate and in his lucid periods he became a kind of elder-statesman of the literary establishment and was visited by many of the period’s most important writers and thinkers. Despite Gillman’s care, however, Coleridge was overcome with respiratory problems and enlargement of the heart. Coleridge died at the age of 61.