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Updated: May 22, 2025
Thus in the early days, when old institutions seemed crumbling with the Bastille, Coleridge and Southey formed their youthful scheme of a "Pantisocracy on the banks of the Susquehanna," an ideal commonwealth, in which the principles of More's Utopia should be put in practice. Even Wordsworth, fired with political enthusiasm, could write,
Coleridge, who, as has been stated, ingeniously parried every adverse argument, and after silencing his hardy disputants, announced to them that he was about to write and publish a quarto volume in defence of Pantisocracy, in which a variety of arguments would be advanced in defence of his system, too subtle and recondite to comport with conversation.
But subject to censure and remonstrance, he must be free to dispose of his property as his own understanding shall dictate. The ideal is equality, and all society should be what Coleridge called a Pantisocracy. It is wrong for any one to enjoy anything, unless something similar is accessible to all, and wrong to produce luxuries until the elementary wants of all are satisfied.
The execution, of so much consequence in the estimation of others, with him was a secondary point. I remember him once to have read to me, from his pocket book; a list of eighteen different works which he had resolved to write, and several of them in quarto, not one of which he ever effected. At the top of the list appeared the word "Pantisocracy! 4to."
Ann Yearsley! Sir H. Davy! Hannah More! Robert Hall! Samuel Taylor Coleridge! Charles Lamb! Thomas Poole! Josiah Wade! Robert Southey! and John Foster! confirming, with fresh emphasis, "What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!" Bristol, April 20, 1847. Pantisocracy and Robert Lovell Mr. Southey and Mr. Burnet arrive in Bristol Mr. Coleridge arrives in Bristol
Southey holds his place in this group more by personal association than by his literary gifts. He was born at Bristol, in 1774; studied at Westminster School, and at Oxford, where he found himself in perpetual conflict with the authorities on account of his independent views. He finally left the university and joined Coleridge in his scheme of a Pantisocracy.
The reader has several times heard of Pantisocracy; a scheme perfectly harmless in itself, though obnoxious to insuperable objections.
He fell in love with Sara Fricker as he fell in love with the French Revolution and with the scheme of "Pantisocracy," and it is indeed extremely probable that the emotions of the lover and the socialist may have subtly acted and reacted upon each other.
They married two sisters, the Misses Fricker, and a third sister married Robert Lovel, also a poet. The experiment of pantisocracy was fortunately never carried out, and Southey's career for the next eight years was exceedingly fragmentary; but in 1803 there was a reunion of the three sisters at Keswick, though one of the husbands, Lovel, was dead.
It is difficult to assign any other reason for the wild scheme of Pantisocracy, than the inexperience of youth, acting on sanguine imaginations.
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