This article presents the first full study of the writing and reception of John Taylor Coleridge’s Memoir of John Keble (1869), based on archival materials in the Coleridge family papers. The Memoir is a complex work shaped by Coleridge’s friendship with Keble, his wish to protect Keble’s reputation, and his private conflicts with his sons over the legacy of the Oxford Movement. Later biographers have been profoundly influenced by the Memoir , inheriting Coleridge’s priorities without recognising them. Understanding it as a historical document, rather than simply as a biographical source, is the necessary first step towards a fuller account of its subject.
