Sara Coleridge - Later Life

Later Life

In 1843 Henry Coleridge died, leaving to his widow the unfinished task of editing her father's works. To these she added some compositions of her own, among which are the Essay on Rationalism, with a special application to the Doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration, appended to Coleridge's Aids to Reflection, a Preface to the Essays on his Own Times, by S. T. Coleridge, and the Introduction to the Biographia Literaria.

During the last few years of her life Sara Coleridge was a confirmed invalid. Shortly before she died she amused herself by writing a little autobiography for her daughter. This, which reaches only to her ninth year, was completed by her daughter, and published in 1873, together with some of her letters, under the title Memoirs and Letters of Sara Coleridge. The letters show a cultured and highly speculative mind. They contain many apt criticisms of known people and books, and are specially interesting for their allusions to Wordsworth and the Lake Poets. Sara Coleridge died in London on 3 May 1852.

Her son, Herbert Coleridge (1830–1861), won a double first class in classics and mathematics at Oxford in 1852. He was secretary to a committee appointed by the Philological Society to consider the project of a standard English dictionary, a scheme of which the New English Dictionary, published by the Clarendon Press, was the ultimate outcome. His personal researches into the subject were contained in his Glossarial Index to the Printed English Literature of the Thirteenth Century (1859).