The Reading Public was an entity for which Coleridge entertained the greatest aversion and contempt. Perhaps his motive was that, whatever the public read, it certainly did not read the works of S. T. Coleridge, neither did it rapidly exhaust the editions of his friend Wordsworth.

However, the public would not read Coleridge, so Coleridge despised his ‘reading public.’ The truth is that poetry was not really what the public of 1804–1820 wanted, though by purchasing largely of Scott and Byron it gave a false impression that poetry was its delight. The public, unconsciously, thirsted for novels and no novels were given unto it. Therefore it fell back on the tales in verse of Scott and Byron, just because they were tales, though rhymed. Wordsworth, Keats, Reynolds and Coleridge gave no story; none knows who married Christabel, if anybody, or what the other mysterious lady had to make in the matter; and there is no love interest in ‘The White Doe of Rylstone.’ So all these were neglected, while the rhymed novels of Scott and Byron ‘sold like hot cakes,’ to use an impressive phrase of Mr. Kipling's applied (see advertisements) to the romances of Mr. Guy Boothby.

When once the Waverley novels began, in 1814, the public showed its real taste by at once ceasing to buy poetry. Even in 1842 Tennyson ‘made a sensation’ in the trade by selling–500 copies of his poems!

One of the firm of Longmans, testifying before a Parliamentary Committee about 1834 declared that from 1814 onward people left off forming libraries and buying erudite books. All was now novels and popular manuals of cheap science and twopenny history, as at present. The reading public in short, had only purchased poetry and history because between Mrs. Radcliffe and Scott there was an entire dearth of readable prose fiction. Thus the reading public was virtuous for want of temptation, and, even when virtuous, would not read Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge. Now S.T.C. knew that he was ‘a wonderful man’ as Wordsworth said, and that the reading public was entirely indifferent to his merit.