![]() ![]() Like Coleridge one hundred years before, Joseph Conrad was also very politically involved and had a soft spot in his heart for oppressed people. This probability will be discussed further momentarily. As Lee and Fry, and “many readers” would agree, this highest “major work” was The Rime of the Ancient Mariner-a poem in which many readers have found an allegory of imperial expansion and the slave trade”. Interestingly, according to one biographer, Paul Fry, Coleridge’s highest aspiration was not to be a poet-he did not even consider this his main vocation Coleridge wanted more than anything to “produce a major work of moral and religious philosophy”. At one point during his career, he even gave a lecture on “Origins of the Human Race” in which he disagreed with a prevailingly popular British idea that Africans were closely related to and resembled apes. According to Debbie Lee, in her convincing article “Yellow Fever and the Slave Trade: Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Coleridge “was thoroughly engaged in social and political issues of the day, from the latest theories of epidemic disease to the debates on abolition and slavery.” Lee also informs that Coleridge “was an active abolitionist in Bristol from 1795 until at least the year he wrote The Ancient Mariner. In 1794, he and two friends composed a play that was sympathetic to British radicals who were reeling after the great bloodshed of the guillotines in 1793, and he had rejoiced when the French Revolution took place in 1789. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was on the revolutionary forefront in many human rights arenas. And because both men were actively involved in human rights discourses and revolutionary thinking outside their writing, as well as within their other works, the possibility that Rime and Heart would contain elements espousing their beliefs is strengthened. Therefore Africans were used to do the grunt work wherever Europeans or Americans needed-be that on sugar-cane plantations in the tropical Pacific or for ivory or rubber excavations in the Congo.Īlthough they lived and wrote at different times-Coleridge was born in 1772 and published The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in 1798, and Conrad was born in 1857 and published Heart of Darkness in 1902, over a century after Coleridge’s best known work-there is convincing evidence that Coleridge and Conrad were both responding to Europe’s guilt in exploiting the African continent and its people. Victorian sensibility dictated that Africa-in all its resources-could and should be exploited to develop newer civilizations. ![]() This idea that the continent was “beckoning” the British makes several assertions: first, that the land was available-nay, even existed-for their taking second, that the “lost” inhabitants of the continent were lesser beings, incapable and undeserving of maintaining their resources.īecause the British believed the Africans had not evolved past their “primeval state,” they viewed them as inferior-closer associated to the natural world than to the realm of human beings, and they had no qualms about “mining” this old continent “for slaves to send to the new world” (Wyk Smith 13). van Wyk Smith described Victorian impressions, “…sub-Saharan Africa…is the true Africa of Renaissance exotic myth and wild hordes, the lost civilization and the elusive paradise, and it is the Africa which became the great beckoning continent for the explorers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the time in which Heart of Darkness was written when the British Empire was “at its Victorian zenith” (Maier-Katkin 585), Europe had some very specific ideologies about the African continent and its inhabitants. Regardless of the cause for the lack of scholarship on the subject, a comparison of Coleridge’s Rime to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness will expose the kindred beliefs espoused in these two works, as well as the stylistic and thematic reflections. Perhaps the explanation for this oddity is simple: no one wants to be the one to answer an obvious question though this reasoning does not seem to hinder anyone from joining the ranks of those who have written about the anti-imperialistic sentiments of Conrad’s most famous book. ![]() Despite the fact, however, that Coleridge’s famous poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness share vast similarities, surprisingly few scholars have approached any sort of comparison. ![]() These are only a few of the similarities between the lives and works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Joseph Conrad, both British citizens though one through birth and one through immigration. Two orphaned boys grow up to be politically-concerned authors, one a poet and one a novelist, who use their maritime literature to speak out against the prevailing ills of European society, specifically the wrongful treatment of African people. ![]()
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