Stephen Coleridge

The Honourable Stephen Coleridge
File:StephenColeridge.jpg Portrait of Stephen Coleridge by Bernard Partridge
Born	(1854-05-31)31 May 1854
Died
Occupation	Activist, author, barrister

Stephen William Buchanan Coleridge (31 May 1854 – 10 April 1936) was an English author, barrister, opponent of vivisection, and co-founder of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

Biography

Coleridge was the second son of John Duke Coleridge, Lord Chief Justice of England, and Jane Fortescue Seymour, an accomplished artist. His grandfather was nephew to the famous poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. At fourteen he was sent to the public school Bradfield College; this seems to have rankled since his father, grandfather and elder brother were all educated at the more prestigious Eton. He attended Trinity College, Cambridge where he graduated in 1878.

Coleridge came to widespread public attention in England in 1903, when he publicly accused William Bayliss of the Department of Physiology at University College London of having broken the law during an experiment on a dog, thereby sparking the Brown Dog affair. Bayliss sued for libel and was awarded damages of £2,000.

Coleridge was also an accomplished landscape artist, who exhibited at the Alpine Club Gallery, the Suffolk Street galleries and the Royal Academy.

Selected publications

• Broken Gods (1903)
• Vivisection: A Heartless Science (1916)
• Great Testimony Against Scientific Cruelty (1918)

Gallery

• Stephen Coleridge by Jane Fortescue Seymour.jpg

  Coleridge, circa 1873

• 

  Coleridge caricatured by ELF for Vanity Fair, 1910

External links

• Works by Stephen Coleridge at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Stephen Coleridge at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)