Epilogue

Abstract

The Epilogue examines Coleridge’s reception and influence at the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1833, and explores his small role in the nomenclature of Victorian science. The mythography that elevated Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s scientific standing above that of his forebears is shown to be false, although it played into Counter-Enlightenment narratives of the sort propounded by Isaiah Berlin, who contended that for the Romantics ‘Science is submission’. In fact, Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s compulsively analogical imaginations awakened in them a lasting curiosity for scientific structures which parallels Tennyson’s own scientific allegiances. It was a trajectory that they experienced together, on the Somersetshire hills, in the pages of the Philosophical Transactions, and in the poems, schemes, and experiments which culminated in Wordsworth’s pivotal 1802 amendments to the Preface to Lyrical Ballads.