What's In A Name?

Why Biographia? A few years ago, I was looking for a copy of Coleridge's literary autobiography, Biographia Literaria, to help my teaching of an A Level course on the Romantic poets. I thought I would find a copy the same day, but it actually took more than a year before I finally stumbled across one on a second hand market stall in Bridport. I paid £10, a bargain if the value of the book is based on its rarity value. Contrary to his reputation, Coleridge was quite modest - he starts Chapter 1 with the following statement: "It has been my lot to have had my name introduced both in conversation, and in print, more frequently than I find it easy to explain, whether I consider the fewness, unimportance, and limited circulation of my writings, or the retirement and distance, in which I have lived, both from the literary and political world."

Biographia is also, at the moment, in limited circulation, but all businesses have to start somewhere. We are launching this company shortly before the birthday of my late brother, Christopher, to whom we are dedicating this enterprise. Foster, as we all knew him, was an entrepreneur who would have been the first to encourage our efforts with Biographia. I would have produced a biography for him last year to mark his 60th birthday if he had lived that long. He was a great romantic and would have loved the Biographia name, not least because he was a keen sailor, a mariner who sadly never grew to be ancient. Coleridge was a brilliant story teller. We hope that Biographia will also be responsible for memorable story telling in all the biographies, albeit in prose, not poetry, private, not public. As we say on the Home page on the website, everyone has a story to tell, not least our first customers, a Wiltshire gamekeeper and his globe-trotting wife. My favourite line from this first biography was uttered by the globetrotter when her husband informed her, on his retirement, that he would not be going abroad on holiday again. "That's a shame," she replied, "because I'm retiring to go on more holidays." Put another way, she also told her husband: "I save to live, you save to die." We have also come up with some names for the four different products we are offering. Sandbrook, the 20,000 word biography, is named after our home, a farmhouse in Somerset surrounded by orchards and overlooking Cadbury Castle, one of the possible sites of King Arthur's Camelot, the name for our 50,000 biography. Coleridge also lends his name to our 96 page offering while the last version, Dolphin, coming in at 40,000 words, is named after the emblem for King's Bruton, the school my wife and I worked at for many years. It also lends its name to the school magazine I edited for 20 years. My last issue (see image above) happily coincided with the school's 500th anniversary, a year of many celebrations culminating in a visit by Her Majesty the Queen. Share this post: