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Following the success of Aids to Reflection and Biographia Literaria, Sara Coleridge's drive to construct her father's posthumous reputation con­tinued in two veins: she organized and reorganized the corpus, invent­ing editions, arguing for his historical significance; and she continued to defend him from the swirl of charges that threatened his reputation. Having seen off charges of heresy by placing him in the vanguard of emerging theological developments, and plagiarism by admitting the charges within the context of a frank psychological and emotional portrait, she confronted the older charge—Jacobinism. This unenviable task became inevitable once she decided to publish a three-volume col­lection of Coleridge's journalism in what became Essays On His Own Times Forming a Second Series of the Friend.¹ Her task was made especially difficult by her desire to reduce her father's long career to a perfectly coherent system of belief she termed the "consistency of the author's opinions". One of Sara Coleridge's main goals in the construction of Essays On His Own Times was the creation of an ideologically closed text out of heterogeneous source materials.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230283091_8

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