Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Anglican Church would not seem a likely title to anyone who knew Coleridge (1772–1834) only as a poet. Luke Wright is not too concerned about this, making a clean break between Coleridge the poet and Coleridge the decidedly un-poetic theological writer. Wright's intended audience consists of those intellectually (and perhaps indiscriminatingly) fascinated by everything Coleridge wrote, and those intrigued by Coleridge chiefly in relation to certain literary-theological-political controversies of eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Anglican Church is not the most descriptive title; “Coleridge and Anglican Theories of Church and State” might serve a little better. Wright's overarching topic is the way in Richard Hooker's late sixteenth-century Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity was later used in formative British debates about the respective responsibilities of the state church and the state's legislature. What animates this discussion for Wright is the changing fortunes of Whigs and Tories in light of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Obviously the justification of the new regime was intellectually problematic for Whigs and Tories alike.

What focuses this discussion for Wright is the contract theory of church and state (borrowed from the “conservative elements” of John Locke's theories, he says) employed by William Warburton in defense of the Court Whigs, in combination with appeals to Hooker, while he wrote The Alliance of Church and State in the 1730s. When it came to “church” and “state” in this prolonged controversy, it is Wright's contention that Warburton (in spite of his protests) did violence to Hooker's political theology and that Coleridge finally called his bluff. “Hooker's and Coleridge's model may be better described as one of tacit acceptance or acclamation of the state church on the part of the populace—giving the royal governorship of the church an almost democratic legitimacy from the grassroots” (185–86). It was an approach that made a deep impression on a young (and later, an aging) William Ewart Gladstone.

On the other hand Hooker, and Coleridge after him, put to the center the idea that the monarch was the head of “the two societies” of church and state (205). To give voice to Coleridge himself, in words from his late-career On the Constitution of the Church and State (1830): “The right idea of a STATE, or Body Politic [is] . . . a constituted Realm, Kingdom, commonwealth, or Nation, i.e. where the integral parts, classes, or orders are so balanced, or interdependent, as to constitute, more or less, a moral unit, an organic whole . . . with the King as its head, and of the CHURCH, likewise the King as its head; and lastly of the King as the Head or Majesty of the whole nation” (185).

By “Church,” of course, Coleridge meant the Church of England, at the very time when its political hegemony was increasingly challenged by both British Roman Catholicism and by dissenting British Protestant groups. In the face of this it was the “Anglican” idea of the “organic” nature of the nation that allowed Coleridge to promote the idea of a later much invoked “clerisy,” that is the clergy in their role as the moral educators of the nation.

This monograph was hard work for the author, who finds himself often driven to invoke the word “capricious” in his attempts to comprehend Coleridge: “the occasional and capricious nature of [Coleridge's] thought (30); “Coleridge's eclectic and capricious mind” (41); “the capricious nature of Coleridge's early thought” (93n6); and “not, however, any less prolix or capricious than other Coleridge texts” (185). Nor does this exhaust Wright's adjectives of despair; “confusingly eclectic” (187) and others pepper his text.

In an attempt to sort out the mind of Coleridge, Wright gives much time to sorting out precisely when Coleridge read and reread certain parts of Hooker and when drafts of his later books were set down and picked up again for revision and expansion. And for the same reason, in the second half of the book, Wright is compelled to plod chronologically through Coleridge's major publications, producing what feels more like a collection of essays than a sustained theological evaluation. At the same time Wright finds it hard not to pick up and comment upon themes other than “church and state”—pieces of philosophical theology for instance. This makes it a demanding book to read, as Wright's style of explanation regularly shifts genre gears to match Coleridge's meandering interests.

In terms of Wright's major argument about Coleridge, that he revived the organic and unified idea of church and state under the crown, this book is a significant contribution to Victorian studies. His description of Coleridge as a High Church Tory, proto-Tractarian deserves to be tested a little more carefully. It ought to be tested, in particular, by the keenness with which F. D. Maurice and the early Broad Church picked up Coleridge to read and the speed with which the Tractarian movement considered aspects of disestablishment.

But, when all is said and done, Wright must be commended for a thorough and illuminating treatment of the theological thought of a much beloved but capricious intellectual.