This new collection enables students and general readers to appreciate Coleridge’s renewed relevance 250 years after his birth. An indispensable guide to his writing for twenty-first-century readers, it contains new perspectives that reframe his work in relation to slavery, race, war, post-traumatic stress disorder and ecological crisis. Through detailed engagement with Coleridge’s pioneering poetry, the reader is invited to explore fundamental questions on themes ranging from nature and trauma to gender and sexuality. Essays by leading Coleridge scholars analyse and render accessible his extraordinarily innovative thinking about dreams, psychoanalysis, genius and symbolism. Coleridge is often a direct and gripping writer, yet he is also elusive and diverse. This Companion’s great achievement is to offer a one-volume entry point into his incomparably rich and varied world.

This chapter goes in search of the gambling habits and propensities of the bulk of the population, but does so by focusing in the first place on the gambling of the lower orders and many among the middling sorts in the giant British capital. Through examination of a range of activities, including cricket and lottery insurance, and different gambling locales, it seeks to map the sheer extent and diversity of gambling at this level of society in eighteenth-century London. If London in this period was a ‘gambler’s paradise’, as one historian has claimed, then this was about much more than its exclusive gambling clubs. The final section of the chapter focuses on one activity which became very closely identified with betting in the later Georgian era, and across Britain – pedestrianism, or foot-racing. Through exploring the development and appeal of this sport, it seeks to plot a path forwards from the eighteenth century into the world of early to mid nineteenth century popular sport and betting, in which the centre of gravity moved decisively away from London and to the rapidly growing industrial regions and towns of north and midlands, as well as the manufacturing regions of lowland Scotland.