After his father died in 1781, Coleridge attended Christ's Hospital School in London, where he met lifelong friend Charles Lamb. The youngest child in the family, Coleridge was a student at his father's school and an avid reader.
His father, a vicar of a parish and master of a grammar school, married twice and had fourteen children. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a leader of the British Romantic movement, was born on October 21, 1772, in Devonshire, England.
