SOURCE: “The Cool World of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Thomas Holcroft, Hyperhack,”The Wordsworth Circle, Vol. XI, No. 4, Autumn, 1980, pp. 212-14.

In the following essay, Zall summarizes Holcroft's career, highlighting his high level of productivity and many hardships.

Hazlitt edited his memoirs and more recently the Oxford Press exhumed two of his Jacobinical novels, else the voice of Thomas Holcroft would no longer be heard in the land. How different from his own time when that voice was hard to avoid. After Coleridge met Holcroft in person, someone asked how he had struck him, and Coleridge quipped, “I felt myself in more danger of being struck by him.”¹ Later, he described Holcroft at full tide: “Fierce, hot petulant, the very High priest of Atheism.” He called him “High” perhaps in jest since Holcroft was short and slight. What did he think of Dr. Priestley? “‘There is a Petitisse in...