Josiah Wade

Josiah Wade (1760/61-1842) was an attendant at the Broadmead church, where he paid for pew subscriptions in 1787, 1788, and 1790, and later at the Baptist meeting in the Pithay, where he worshiped with Joseph Cottle. Wade was especially devoted to the ministry of Thomas Roberts during his tenure as pastor at the Pithay. He came to know John Foster and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the 1790s as well. During the summer of 1794, shortly before Coleridge’s initial visit to Bristol with Robert Southey, both Cottle and Wade contributed monies to rebuild the Baptist meeting house in Salisbury. Coleridge lived with Wade during his visit to Bristol in 1813-1814, when Coleridge was attempting to control his opium addiction. Two letters of Coleridge, both written from Bath in December 1813—one to Josiah Wade and the other to Thomas Roberts (1780-1841), graduate of the Academy in Bristol—provide a telling look at Coleridge’s opium addiction as well as Coleridge’s longstanding connections with prominent Baptist figures.  In the letter to Wade, dated 8 December 1813, Coleridge writes: “Pray for my recovery—and request Mr. Robarts’s [sic] Prayers—but for my infirm wicked Heart, that Christ may mediate to the Father to lead me to Christ, & give me a living instead of a reasoning Faith!—and for my Health as far only as it may be the condition of my Improvement & final Redemption.” More information on Wade and Coleridge comes from a letter by John Foster to the Rev. Josiah Hill, dated May 1842, in which Foster writes:  

You have heard mention of Mr. Wade, near the Hotwells, Coleridge’s friend. I attended his funeral on Monday morning … [Foster had visited him during his last sudden illness] I thought he recognized me just for a moment; as indicated by a slight transient smile.  I do not remember how or when I became acquainted with him, many years since. I had always found him extremely kind and hospitable. For years I had dined with him about once a month, usually in the company of Roberts, to whom he had been a faithful friend, and an attendant on his ministry. A few months before his death he made me a present of a very splendid set of engravings which had cost him thirty pounds. His age was eighty-one. He was not a literary nor properly speaking an intellectual man; it having been from mere generous good-will to a man floating loose on society, that he had, some forty years since, put his house and purse at the free service of Coleridge, and partly his associates … He did not make formally what we denominate a profession of religion, but there were favorable indications in the manner in which he expressed himself in his illness.

The letter reveals an interesting linkage between Foster, Cottle, Wade, and Roberts and the activities of the BMS in India. See Broadmead Subscription Book, no. 3, 1772-1813; for Cottle’s and Wade’s signatures in the collection book for Salisbury, see Saffery-Whitaker Papers, acc. 180, B/4, Angus Library, Regent’s Park College, Oxford; E. L. Griggs, ed., Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956-1971), 3:462; Ryland, Life and Correspondence, 2:275-276 (for Foster letter quoted above); Whelan, “John Foster,” 644-646.