SOURCE: “Childhood Lost, Childhood Regained: Hartley Coleridge's Fable of Defeat,” in Children's Literature, Vol. 14, 1986, pp. 133-61.

This essay begins with a brief sketch of Coleridge's life, then moves on to provide a reading of “Adolf and Annette,” a hitherto unpublished fairy story by the author. Plotz contends that this tale is an allegory of growing up in general and of Coleridge's own “romantic rearing in particular.”

From all accounts “Li’le Hartley,” “poor Hartley” Coleridge, eldest son of Samuel Taylor and Sara Coleridge, was the most beguiling child anyone had ever seen.¹ Yet the pathetic story of his life, from precocious infancy to wasted manhood, is a paradigmatic romantic failure, the failure of the supremely gifted child who does not fulfill the enormous promise of his youth. Romanticism taught us, as—more to the point—it taught Hartley, to regard childhood powers of consciousness and temperament as normative...