COLERIDGE, HENRY JAMES

Editor and writer; b. Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, Sept. 20, 1822; d. Roehampton, April 13, 1893. He was a great-nephew of Samuel Taylor Coleridge; the son of John Taylor Coleridge, a judge of the Queen's Bench; and the brother of Lord Coleridge, the Lord Chief Justice of England. After attending Eton, he followed J. H. Newman's footsteps at Oxford as a scholar of Trinity College who became a fellow at Oriel. He took Anglican orders in 1848 and was one of the cofounders of the Guardian, the organ of the High Church party. One of the second generation of the Tractarians (see tractarianism), he was refused appointment as tutor at Oriel because of his devotion to Newman, just after Newman was received into the Church. Coleridge himself was received in 1852, went to Rome, where he studied for the priesthood at the Accademia dei Nobili, and was ordained (1856). The following year he entered the Jesuit novitiate at Roehampton; his superiors quickly availed themselves of his exceptional talent, and in 1865 he was appointed editor of the recently founded (1864) Month. During the 16 years of his editorship, the journal became a leading Catholic publication. He was also editor of the Messenger (1877–81). He was a thorough scholar, and in order to raise the level of Catholic education, he founded the Quarterly series, to which he contributed, among other works, The Public Life of Our Lord (1872), The Life and Letters of St. Francis Xavier (1872), The Life and Letters of St. Teresa (1881–88), and The Story of the Gospels Harmonized for Meditation (1884). In all he wrote some 20 books. Always an ardent student of the New Testament, he devoted himself to this interest in his later years, even after his health broke in 1890. He spent the last two years of his life, a period of great suffering, at the novitiate where he had begun his Jesuit life.

Bibliography: j. patterson and r. f. clarke in Month (1893) 153–181.

[d. woodruff]