This chapter doubles down on the relation of the friend to consciousness as part of two broader propositions. The first is that the extensions of mind that undergird Romantic-era concepts and promotions of friends are crucial to Romantic depictions of consciousness and hopes for facilitating firmer trust between people. My basic contention is that the linkage among friendship, literary creativity, and social justice posited and enacted by Romantic-era writers is the radical promise and under-recognized legacy of the 1790s. The second proposition is that championing the friend, whether in British Romanticism or current ‘social justice activism,’ has validity only if said friend is credible to doubly conscious minds: that is, to persons whose consciousness lets them know that consciousness is informed by structural asymmetries embedded in racism (Banerjea et al.). Thus a doubly conscious self-dividing friend recognizes the privileges accorded to whiteness and opposes the good/s undergirding classical–romantic philosophical concepts of friends. This means that any path toward social justice envisioned as undertaken via the friend begins from conceptual and societal starting points that differ for white and for non-white aspirants.

To elucidate these propositions, I focus on Coleridge's The Friend, issued first in periodical format (1809–10) and ultimately codified into a book (1818). As the title suggests, The Friend is the most explicit and sustained reflection on the friend in British Romanticism, a reflection that is avowedly self-divided and textually overdetermined and indeterminate. It epitomizes several of the reasons why I propose ‘the method of the friend’ as the legacy of white radical Romanticism. First, friendship for these writers is the relational model best inclined toward justice because it is least tied to hetero-biological imperatives and because the bonds established between friends are extra-legal and non-institutionalized, and thus sustained largely by inclination. Espoused by new philosophical writers in the early 1790s who were intimate friends, their friend is a pivotal concept (self as friend and friend of humanity) and an enactable method of moving out from the given toward a diverse collectivity. They envision and characterize themselves as ‘United helpers forward of a day / Of firmer trust’ by virtue of being writer–friend–activists (Wordsworth, The Prelude 13.438–9 [1805]). A second reason is that their friend as concept and out-reaching project founders, sometimes colossally so.