Читать книгу The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge - Adam Sisman - Страница 13

Arriving in London at the beginning of September, Coleridge was too ashamed of his scruffy clothes to go to the coffee house where he had stayed in the past, so instead he lodged at the Angel Inn, down a lane off disreputable Newgate Street. Southey’s aristocratic friend Grosvenor Charles Bedford received him politely – even though his appearance was ‘so very anti-genteel’ – and was civil enough not to stare at the address Coleridge gave him. As expected, he was not enthusiastic about Pantisocracy. A couple of days later Coleridge was introduced over breakfast to George Dyer, an eccentric middle-aged Unitarian, author of Complaints of the Poor People of England, who had been a pupil at Christ’s Hospital and an undergraduate at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. By contrast with Bedford, Dyer was ‘enraptured’ with Pantisocracy, and pronounced it impregnable’. Coleridge told Southey complacently that Dyer was ‘intimate with’ Joseph Priestley (already settled on the Susquehanna), ‘and doubts not, that the Doctor will join us’. On being shown part of the verse drama ‘he liked it hugely’ and opined that it was a ‘Nail, that would drive’. Dyer offered to speak to Robinson, his ‘Bookseller’ (publisher), about it, and when Robinson proved to be away in the country, took it to two others, neither of whom seemed keen.¹ After this depressing reaction Coleridge decided that he and Southey should publish the drama themselves, printing five hundred copies; ‘it will repay us amply’. It should be published under his name alone, he told Southey, because ‘it would appear ridiculous to put two names to such a Work’, and because his name would sell at least a hundred copies within Cambridge.² The Fall of Robespierre duly appeared as the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge at Jesus College at the end of September.

For the next fortnight or so, Coleridge spent every evening at another ale house in Newgate Street, the Salutation and Cat, where he preached Pantisocracy to two former Christ’s Hospital schoolboys, both nineteen, Samuel Le Grice (younger brother of Coleridge’s contemporary Valentine) and Samuel Favell. The three Sams made a comfortable party, talking and drinking porter and punch around a good fire. They were joined by another former Christ’s Hospital pupil, who remembered Coleridge kindly, a young man who had spent the last five years in America. He advised that they could buy land a great deal cheaper over there, Coleridge informed Southey, and that ‘twelve men may easily clear three hundred Acres in 4 or 5 months’; that the Susquehanna valley was to be recommended for its ‘excessive Beauty, and it’s security from hostile Indians’; that ‘literary Characters make money there’; that ‘he never saw a Byson in his Life – but has heard of them’; that ‘the Musquitos are not so bad as our Gnats – and after you have been there a little while, they don’t trouble you much’.³ Altogether this was very encouraging.

Coleridge returned to Cambridge later than he had intended, to find that the undergraduates he had encountered on the road during his tour of Wales had ‘spread my Opinions in mangled forms’. He soon set them right. There was some interest in Pantisocracy within the university, and some amusement too; Coleridge was a colourful character. But his eloquence trounced all opposition; within a month of his return, he boasted, Pantisocracy was the ‘universal Topic’ there. Meanwhile – notwithstanding his understanding with Sara Fricker – he flirted with Ann, sister of the celebrated actress Elizabeth Brunton and daughter of John Brunton, actor-manager of a company based in Norwich. He dedicated to her a poem on the French Revolution which he inscribed in a presentation copy of The Fall of Robespierre. He planned to visit the Bruntons in Norwich in the New Year. ‘The young lady is said to be the most literary of the beautiful, and the most beautiful of the literatae,’ he wrote provocatively to Southey – while almost in the same breath defending himself against the charge that he had written too seldom to Sara.

Southey had been having a difficult time. Once Coleridge had left, it seemed that ‘all the prejudices of the human heart are in arms against me’. Neither his fiancée nor his mother was keen to leave England. His rich aunt turned him out of the house one wet night when she discovered his plan to emigrate from her servant Shadrach Weeks, whom Coleridge had recruited to Pantisocracy. She was equally disapproving of his plan to marry Edith Fricker, a milliner. Though Southey (parroting Godwin) preached disregarding ‘individual feelings’ – towards one’s mother or future wife, for example – he found this principle hard to practise. To Coleridge, Southey appeared to be backsliding, now saying that some of the emigrants might continue as servants, thereby freeing others of domestic chores. ‘Let them dine with us and be treated with as much equality as they would wish – but perform that part of Labor for which their Education has fitted them,’ he advocated. ‘Southey should not have written this Sentence,’ insisted Coleridge, who suspected that his friend’s resolve was being undermined by the women in the party.⁴

But while Coleridge strove to keep Southey to the founding principles of Pantisocracy, Southey chided him for neglecting Sara Fricker. Each sought the moral high ground. Southey was painfully aware that he had forfeited his aunt’s favour, at least partly for Edith’s sake. In self-righteous mood, he was intolerant of Coleridge’s vacillating commitment to Sara. It is possible that Southey was under pressure from Edith to argue her sister’s case with his friend. But it seems likely too that Southey was genuinely concerned about Sara. There is some evidence that he had been interested in her himself, before turning his attentions towards her more placid younger sister. In later life he continued to be solicitous for her welfare. Moreover, in encouraging Coleridge’s relationship with Sara, he was binding Coleridge closer to himself – ‘I shall then call Coleridge my brother in the real sense of the word.’⁵ Conversely, Coleridge encouraged Southey’s relationship with Edith. ‘I am longing to be with you,’ he wrote to Southey on his first morning in Cambridge: ‘Make Edith my Sister – Surely, Southey! We shall be frendotatoi meta frendous. Most friendly where all are friends. She must therefore be more emphatically my Sister.’ In this overwrought dialogue, each man was goading the other to commit – to the woman certainly, but also to Pantisocracy, perhaps also to himself. For Coleridge, all three were bound up with each other: ‘America! Southey! Miss Fricker!’ He convinced himself that he was in love with her: ‘Yes – Southey – you are right – Even Love is the creature of strong Motive – I certainly love her.’⁶ Yet a week later he described himself as ‘labouring under a waking Night-Mair of Spirits’⁷ – not the expected state of mind for a young man in love. In the first letter he wrote to Sara from Cambridge, his own eloquence betrayed him into expressing emotions he did not fully feel. He later described this as ‘the most criminal action of my Life … I had worked myself to such a pitch, that I scarcely knew I was writing like an hypocrite.’ When it was too late, he recognised that he had ‘mistaken the ebullience of schematism for affection, which a moment’s reflection might have told me, is not a plant of so mushroom a growth’.⁸

‘God forbid!’ replied Southey, ‘that the Ebullience of Schematism should be over. It is the Promethean Fire that animates my soul – and when that is gone, all will be darkness! I have DEVOTED myself! –’⁹

The night he arrived back in Cambridge, Coleridge wrote a strange, emotional letter to Edith, recalling his own dead sister Nancy.

I had a Sister – an only Sister. Most tenderly did I love her! Yea, I have woke at midnight, and wept – because she was not …

There is no attachment under heaven so pure, so endearing …

My Sister, like you, was beautiful and accomplished … I know, and feel, that I am your Brother – I would, that you would say to me – ‘I will be your sister – your favourite Sister in the Family of Soul.’¹⁰

A month later, Coleridge was thrown into deeper confusion by the arrival of an unsigned letter in a familiar hand: ‘Is this handwriting altogether erased from your Memory? To whom am I addressing myself? For whom am I now violating the Rules of female Delicacy? Is it for the same Coleridge, whom I once regarded as a Sister her best-beloved Brother?’ The writer urged him to abandon his ‘absurd and extravagant’ plan to leave England. ‘I cannot easily forget those whom I once loved,’ she wrote teasingly, and finished: ‘Farewell – Coleridge – ! I shall always feel that I have been your Sister.’ The writer, of course, was Mary Evans. She may have written at the request of George Coleridge, who was deeply distressed at the possibility that his youngest brother might emigrate. George had also written to him direct – a letter of ‘remonstrance, and Anguish, & suggestions, that I am deranged!!’

Coleridge copied out Mary’s letter for Southey:

I loved her, Southey! almost to madness … I endeavoured to be perpetually with Miss Brunton – I even hoped, that her Exquisite Beauty and uncommon Accomplishments might have cured one passion by another. The latter I could easily have dissipated in her absence – and so have restored my affections to her, whom I do not love – but whom by every tie of Reason and Honour I ought to love. I am resolved – but wretched!

He was now in even more of a muddle. ‘My thoughts are floating about in a most Chaotic State,’ he confessed. ‘What would I not give for a Day’s conversation with you? So much, that I seriously think of Mail coaching it to Bath – altho’ but for a Day.’¹¹

His excitable state of mind is evident in a letter he wrote around this time to Francis Wrangham, formerly of Cambridge, now a Cobham curate, in which he sneered at the stock formula of sending ‘compliments’.*

Compliments! Cold aristocratic Inanities – ! I abjure their nothingness. If there be any whom I deem worthy of remembrance – I am their Brother. I call even my Cat Sister in the Fraternity of universal Nature. Owls I respect & Jack Asses I love: for Aldermen & Hogs, Bishops & Royston Crows I have not particular partiality –; they are my Cousins however, at least by Courtesy. But Kings, Wolves, Tygers, Generals, Ministers, and Hyaenas, I renounce them all – or if they must be my kinsmen, it shall be in the 50th Remove –

He ended this letter with the exhortation: ‘May the Almighty Panti-socratizer of Souls pantisocratize the Earth.’¹³ A little later, he addressed a poem ‘To a Young Ass’, which opened with the line ‘Poor Little Foal of an oppressed Race’:

Innocent Foal! Thou poor despis’d Forlorn! –

I hail thee Brother, spite of Fool’s Scorn!

And fain I’d take thee with me in the Dell

Of high-soul’d Pantisocracy to dwell;

Coleridge was much mocked for this poem after it was published.

He could not stop thinking about Mary Evans. ‘She WAS VERY lovely, Southey!’ He wrote a poem about her, ‘On a Discovery Made Too Late’. Finally, he screwed up the courage to write to her: ‘Too long has my Heart been the torture house of Suspense.’ He had heard a rumour that she was engaged to be married to another man. Was it true? In asking this, he had no other design or expectation, he said, ‘than that of arming my fortitude by total hopelessness’. He saw that she regarded him ‘merely with the kindness of a Sister’. For four years, he wrote, ‘I have endeavoured to smother a very ardent attachment … Happy were I, had it been with no more than a Brother’s ardor!’¹⁴

He received another letter from George, now suggesting that he should leave Cambridge and study law in the Temple – and in reply, assured his brother that the views he had put into the mouths of his characters in The Fall of Robespierre were not his own. ‘Solemnly, my Brother! I tell you – I am not a Democrat.’¹⁵ (Thomas Poole had described Coleridge as ‘in politicks a Democrat, to the utmost extent of the word’.¹⁶)

Early in November Coleridge travelled up to London with his friend Potter, an undergraduate at Emmanuel, a fellow poet, and liberal in politics despite having £6,000 a year and his own phaeton. The cases against the twelve prominent radicals charged with treason had come to trial,* and Coleridge wanted to be on the spot. (He may have attended the trials themselves in the public gallery.) Robert Lovell was in town too; he visited one of the defendants, Godwin’s close friend Thomas Holcroft, in Newgate prison, and attempted to convert him to Pantisocracy. He believed (mistakenly) that he had succeeded, and reported back to Southey that ‘Gerrald,† Holcroft and Godwin – the three first men in England, perhaps in the world – highly approve our plan’.¹⁷ Superbly represented in court by the brilliant advocate Thomas Erskine (who had defended Paine when he was tried in absentia in 1792), the accused had also been powerfully defended in print by Godwin, whose pamphlet Cursory Strictures on the Charge delivered by Lord Chief Justice Eyre to the Grand Jury dissected the treason charges, leaving them in tatters. (Coleridge may well have read Godwin’s Strictures, which were reproduced in the Morning Chronicle.) Though the government had raided the homes of the radicals and seized their papers, the searches had failed to turn up incriminating evidence of a conspiracy. The Attorney-General, Sir John Scott (later Lord Eldon), resorted to petulant tears in his attempt to persuade the jury to convict – but in vain. As one after another of the defendants was acquitted, it became clear that the government had overreached itself. Pitt himself was subpoenaed by the defence and humiliated in the witness box. After several successive acquittals, charges against the remaining prisoners were dropped.

The verdicts were a triumph for the resurgent radical cause. On their release, the radicals – among them Thomas Hardy, founder of the London Corresponding Society, the orator and writer John Thelwall, and the pamphleteer John Horne Tooke – were greeted as heroes. Coleridge celebrated with a sonnet in honour of Erskine, the first of a sequence of eleven ‘Sonnets on Eminent Characters’ published in the Morning Chronicle from 1 December onwards. Most of his subjects were prominent liberal or radical figures, such as Priestley, Godwin and Sheridan,* but he also wrote a sonnet honouring William Lisle Bowles, the poet he had admired so much as a schoolboy, and even a sonnet to Southey. One sonnet was devoted to Tadeusz Kościuszko, the Polish patriot who had led the armed resistance to the partition of his country; another, unlike the others scathingly critical, to a subject who, though unnamed, was obviously (‘foul apostate from his father’s fame’) the Prime Minister.

Coleridge had returned to Jesus after a week in the capital, but early in December he again left Cambridge for London, this time never to return. Once more he based himself at the Salutation and Cat, where, as one story has it, he attracted so many listeners that in recognition the landlord provided him with free lodging.† Here Coleridge was reunited with another former Christ’s Hospital pupil, Charles Lamb, who was to become one of his closest friends. They had known each other at school – but not intimately, since Lamb was three years younger. Indeed Lamb had hero-worshipped Coleridge, whose schoolboy eloquence was such that it could make the casual passer-by pause in the cloisters and stand entranced. Lamb was a lovable figure, gentle and delicate. A severe stutter provoked indulgent affection rather than derision from his schoolmates. Slightly built, with spindly legs and a shambling gait, the legacy of childhood polio, Lamb habitually dressed in worn black clothes, giving him the appearance of a country curate recently arrived in town. The austerity of his dress was relieved by what Hazlitt (a painter) later described as his ‘fine Titian head’: his curly hair, his startling eyes, each a different colour, and his characteristic expression of droll amusement. Though nervous and shy, and prone to depression, Lamb had an independent mind, fine critical judgement, a strong sense of the ludicrous and a teasing wit. Like Coleridge, he had been a ‘Grecian’, but circumstances had not enabled him to attend university, and he now supported his parents and his elder sister Mary by working as a clerk in the East India Office. In the evenings he unwound in convivial conversation, smoking and drinking, sometimes heavily. After Coleridge had left London Lamb would cherish the memory of their comfortable evenings together by the fire in the Salutation and Cat, drinking ‘egg-hot’* and smoking Oronoko.† Like Coleridge he was a sincere Christian, and at this time of his life was strongly drawn to Unitarianism. Coleridge particularly admired Lamb’s devotion to his sister Mary, whose mind was ‘elegantly stored’ and her heart ‘feeling’.¹⁸

On 16 December Coleridge dined with the two editor-proprietors of the Morning Chronicle. Also present was Thomas Holcroft, known for his dogmatism and fierce argumentativeness. It was immediately obvious that Holcroft had not been impressed when Lovell visited him in Newgate, and he launched into a violent attack on Pantisocracy. Coleridge was not overawed, at least not in the version he relayed to Southey:

I had the honour of working H. a little – and by my great coolness and command of impressive Language certainly did him over – /Sir (said he) I never knew so much real wisdom – & so much rank Error meet in one mind before! Which (answered I) means, I suppose – that in some things, Sir! I agree with you and in others I do not.¹⁹

Holcroft invited Coleridge to dine at his house four days later. Among the other guests was Godwin himself, then at the zenith of his powers. ‘No one was more talked about, more looked up to, more sought after,’ wrote Hazlitt of this period many years afterwards, ‘and wherever liberty, truth, justice was the theme, his name was not far off.’ Though there is no detailed record of their conversation, Godwin noted in his diary afterwards that the talk was of ‘self love & God’. One can be confident that Coleridge – only twenty-two years old – held his own against these two formidable middle-aged men, one an atheist, the other ‘inclined to atheism’. In a letter to Southey some months earlier he had remarked of Godwin, ‘I think not so highly of him as you do – and I have read him with the greatest attention.’²⁰

Coleridge rejected one of Godwin’s essential tenets: of an antithesis between ‘universal benevolence’ and personal or private affections. In support of his argument Godwin cited the example of Brutus* – a cult figure in revolutionary thought – who pro patria sentenced his own sons to death, for plotting to restore the monarchy. Coleridge’s thinking on this subject was the very opposite of Godwin’s: ‘The ardour of private Attachments makes Philanthropy a necessary habit of the soul. I love my Friend – such as he is, all mankind are or might be!’²¹

Just at this moment, Coleridge received a belated reply from Mary Evans. It is not clear what she wrote – but he decided that it was a brush-off. He was calm, he told Southey:

To love her Habit has made unalterable…. To lose her! – I can rise above that selfish Pang. But to marry another – O Southey! bear with my weakness. Love makes all things pure and heavenly like itself: – but to marry a woman whom I do not love – to degrade her, whom I call my Wife, by making her the Instrument of low Desire – and on the removal of a desultory Appetite, to be perhaps not displeased with her Absence! … Mark you, Southey! – I will do my Duty.²²

For seven weeks or more Southey had been ‘in hourly expectation’ of Coleridge. He renewed the pressure on his friend, who had been promising for at least three weeks to return to Bristol ‘within a day or two’. Coleridge protested that he was ‘all eagerness’ to leave town, and resolved to be in Bath by the following Saturday (3 January 1795).²³ But on 2 January he wrote a frantic letter to Southey, full of excuses: the roads were dangerous, the inside of a coach unhealthy, the outside too cold, he had no money, he had a sore throat. Finally he offered to come by wagon, sharing it with four or five calves, wrapped up snugly in the hay. Southey and Lovell walked more than forty miles to Marlborough to meet the wagon – ‘but no S.T. Coleridge was therein!’ Southey wrote irritably to Sara Fricker: ‘Why will he ever fix a day if he cannot abide by it?’²⁴ He decided to fetch Coleridge from London himself.

Mathews wrote to Wordsworth announcing the abandonment of the periodical scheme. He once again encouraged Wordsworth to come to London and earn a living writing for the newspapers. Wordsworth replied that he had decided to come when he could. But he would only feel happy working for an opposition paper, he told Mathews, ‘for really I cannot in conscience and in principle, abet in the smallest degree the measures pursued by the present ministry. They are already so deeply advanced in iniquity that like Macbeth they cannot retreat.’²⁵ Wordsworth’s bitterness against Pitt and his fellow ministers is remarkable, and lasted long after his radicalism had shrivelled – it was obvious even as he wrote The Prelude, a decade later:

Our shepherds (this say merely) at that time

Thirsted to make the guardian crook of law

A tool of murder …

He believed them blind to the lesson of the Terror:

Though with such awful proof before their eyes

That he who would sow death, reaps death, or worse,

And can reap nothing better, childlike longed

To imitate – not wise enough to avoid,

Giants in their impiety alone,

But, in their weapons and their warfare base

As vermin working out of reach, they leagued

Their strength perfidiously to undermine

Justice, and make an end of Liberty.²⁶

Wordsworth joined Mathews in rejoicing at the verdicts in the treason trials: ‘The late occurrences in every point of view are interesting to humanity. They will abate the insolence and presumption of the aristocracy by shewing it that neither the violence, nor the art, of power, can crush even an unfriended individual.’ Wordsworth was further cheered by signs of a shift in opinion in favour of a negotiated peace with France.²⁷

‘I begin to wish much to be in town,’ he informed Mathews; cataracts and mountains are good occasional society, but they will not do for constant companions.’²⁸ Like Coleridge, he was intrigued by developments in the capital.* While Raisley Calvert lingered on, Wordsworth felt unable to leave him; but he quit Penrith almost immediately after Calvert’s death in early January 1795, and a few weeks later he was in London. Straight away, it seems, he found himself at the centre of radical discussion. On 27 February he took tea at the house of William Frend, who had moved to London after his expulsion from Cambridge and was now teaching pupils privately (among them the future social philosopher Thomas Malthus). Also present were eight others, all radicals, including Holcroft, Dyer and Godwin. This was a high-powered gathering of writers, lawyers and university Fellows. These radicals were closely interconnected through a multitude of personal and institutional links, shared interests and beliefs. A majority of those present were Cambridge men, at least two were Unitarians, and several were members of either the Society for Constitutional Information or the London Corresponding Society. Wordsworth, though new to this group, was not a stranger: he had known some of the younger men at Cambridge, George Dyer had been an old friend of his schoolmaster William Taylor, and Holcroft had reviewed his poems (unfavourably) in the Monthly Review. Another of those present, James Losh, a Cambridge friend of Wordsworth’s, had been in Paris late in 1792, and the two of them may have met there, perhaps at the dinner of expatriate Englishmen at White’s Hotel where a toast to Tom Paine had been drunk. Losh and Wordsworth had a further connection in that both came from Cumberland.

Wordsworth called on Godwin the very next day (probably by invitation), and then again ten days later, when he was invited to breakfast. For Wordsworth, to be able to converse tête à tête with the famous philosopher made an exhilarating change from hours spent at Raisley Calvert’s bedside, unable to talk with or even read to the dying young man. During the previous year he had been spouting Godwinian ideas; now he could drink them fresh from the source. This was the time when, according to Hazlitt, Wordsworth urged a young student, ‘Throw aside your books of chemistry, and read Godwin on Necessity.’ Over the coming months Wordsworth called on Godwin a number of times, usually alone, but twice with Mathews, and on one of these occasions also with Joseph Fawcett. Godwin paid Wordsworth the compliment of calling on him too, suggesting that he valued Wordsworth’s company: further evidence, perhaps, of the favourable impression this young man made on others.

Wordsworth’s poetry written in this period shows a strong Godwinian influence. In particular, drawing on Godwin’s philosophical novel The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), he planned to rewrite his Salisbury Plain poem to show how ‘the vices of the penal law and the calamities of war’ could lead an otherwise innocent man to commit the most terrible of crimes.²⁹

Southey bundled a protesting Coleridge onto the Bristol coach, and stood guard over him until they reached their destination. There the two founding Pantisocrats settled into cheap lodgings with George Burnett while they considered their next move. The scheme was not going to plan. There had been no further recruits, and they had not managed to raise anything like enough money to fund their emigration – barely any money at all, in fact (The Fall of Robespierre had not sold so well as hoped). Southey was now in favour of taking a farm in Wales, as a less ambitious venture. When he had first proposed this back in early December, Coleridge had dismissed it as ‘nonsense’. Now, demoralised, he accepted the revised plan.

The immediate need was to earn some money. While in London Southey had tried to interest publishers in his Wat Tyler, but all had declined for fear of prosecution. Coleridge toyed with a number of alternatives, including returning to London to work as a reporter for the Telegraph, and going to Scotland to act as tutor to the sons of the Earl of Buchan. But both of these meant abandoning Sara, and now that they were together again Coleridge found that he did not want to leave her – indeed, very much the opposite. He discovered, too, that she had attracted the attentions of two other men, one of them of large Fortune’, and that she was being pressed by her relatives to accept this suitor if Coleridge would not marry her first. Naturally this discovery increased Coleridge’s interest.

Very quickly it was decided that Coleridge should give a series of public lectures in Bristol’s Corn Market, capitalising on his qualities as an orator by charging a shilling a head in attendance money. The idea may have been inspired by the example of John Thelwall, who since his acquittal had been drawing large audiences – as many as eight hundred at a time – for his political lectures (though even so he found it hard to find a venue that would take him). Coleridge’s first lecture was written at a single sitting, under Southey’s supervision, between midnight and breakfast time of the day on which it was to be delivered. The lectures blasted Pitt’s repressive government and condemned its war against Revolutionary France, earning Coleridge a local reputation as a dangerous radical. He revelled in the notoriety: ‘Mobs and Mayors, Blockheads and Brickbats, Placards and Press gangs have leagued in horrible Conspiracy against me.’ Soon after delivering the first lecture he published this as a pamphlet, claiming he felt ‘obliged’ to do so, ‘it having been confidently asserted that there was Treason in it’. He triumphed over hecklers, and proudly announced to Dyer that he had succeeded in provoking ‘furious and determined’ opposition from ‘the Aristocrats’, to the extent of hiring thugs – ‘uncouth and unbrained Automata’ – who threatened to attack him. After the second lecture it was felt necessary to move the third to a private address – and even then a crowd gathered outside could scarcely be restrained from attacking the house on Castle Green where the ‘damn’d Jacobine was jawing away’.³⁰

Coleridge was an amusing lecturer, and his talks were both well attended and enthusiastically received. He dealt cleverly with hecklers. On one occasion ‘some gentlemen of the opposite party’, disliking what they heard, began to hiss. Coleridge responded instantly: ‘I am not at all surprised, when the red hot prejudices of aristocrats are suddenly plunged into the cool water of reason, that they should go off with a hiss!’ His witty riposte was greeted with ‘immense applause’. There was no more hissing after that.

The lectures were crafted to appeal to the sentiments of the dissenters who formed the majority of Bristol’s radical population. Coleridge likened the People to the blinded Samson, standing between ‘those two massy Pillars of Oppression’s Temple, Monarchy and Aristocracy’; they needed guidance. While deploring revolutionary violence, he insisted on the need for reform to prevent such violence occurring. The ‘great object in which we are anxiously engaged’ was ‘to place Liberty on her seat with bloodless hands’. All this was meat and drink to Bristol’s radicals, who were further cheered by his second lecture, ‘On the Present War’, which referred to ‘the distressful stagnation of Trade and Commerce’, and its woeful effect on the poor in particular:

War ruins our Manufactures; the ruin of our Manufactures throws Thousands out of employ; men cannot starve; they must either pick their countrymen’s Pockets – or cut the throats of their fellow-creatures … If they chuse … the former, they are hung or transported to Botany Bay. And here we cannot but admire the deep and comprehensive Views of our Ministers, who having starved the wretch into Vice send him to the barren shores of New Holland to be starved back again into Virtue.

Soon afterwards, Southey began delivering a course of twelve historical lectures on the background to the French Revolution. Each lecturer helped the other; it was a joint endeavour in suitably Pantisocratic style. ‘We live together and write together,’ Southey reported happily. ‘Coleridge is writing at the same table; our names are written in the book of destiny, on the same page.’³¹

In London Coleridge had tried to place a volume of his poems, but most of the booksellers would not even look at them, and the only offer he received was a derisory six guineas. Here in Bristol, Cottle generously offered him thirty guineas, to be paid in advance as required. ‘The silence and the grasped hand, showed that at that moment one person was happy.’³² Coleridge began collecting his poems and composing new ones for a volume to appear later in the year. Southey was still completing his long historical epic Joan of Arc, to which Coleridge contributed 255 lines and ‘corrected’ the rest. Cottle commissioned handsome portraits of both young authors by Peter Vandyke, a supposed descendant of the Flemish master.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the popularity of Coleridge’s lectures, he was ‘soon obliged by the persecutions of Darkness to discontinue them’.³³ Undeterred, a group of prominent Bristol dissenters commissioned him to deliver a fresh course of six lectures on revealed religion at the Assembly coffee house on the Quay.³⁴ Drawing on the ideas of Unitarian thinkers such as Frend and Priestley, Coleridge denounced the corruption of the Church of England. He ridiculed the dogma of the Trinity, and rejected the doctrine of the Redemption. For Coleridge, the teaching of Jesus Christ called for the complete abolition of private property – a measure too extreme for even the wildest Jacobins.* Indeed, passages from his sixth and final lecture sound like a manifesto for Pantisocracy:

The necessaries of twenty men are raised by one man, who works ten hours a day exclusive of his meals. How then are the other nineteen employed? Some of them are mechanics and merchants who collect and prepare those things which urge this field Labourer to unnatural Toil by unnatural Luxuries – others are Princes and Nobles and Gentlemen who stimulate his exertions by exciting his envy, and others are Lawyers and Priests and Hangmen who seduce or terrify him into passive submission. Now if instead of this one man the whole twenty were to divide the labor and dismiss all unnecessary wants it is evident that none of us would work more than two hours a day of necessity, and that all of us might be learned from the advantages of opportunities, and innocent from the absence of Temptation.

The lectures demonstrate the central importance to Coleridge of Christian revelation, an emphasis that distinguished him from radicals such as Thelwall. Indeed, Coleridge was repelled by the atheism and apparent immorality of many of the most prominent radicals, and appalled that such men might capture the leadership of the people. He was particularly concerned at the ubiquity of Godwin’s ideas in the minds of radicals. In the process of writing these lectures Coleridge sought to develop a Christian alternative to Godwin’s atheistic radicalism.³⁵ Much of his opposition to Godwin stemmed from his (brief) personal experience of the man, and of Godwin’s close associate Holcroft. There is a pugnacious tone to his criticism of Godwin, which suggests rivalry: ‘I set him at Defiance.’

Coleridge also delivered two stand-alone lectures, one, ‘by particular desire’, devoted to a subject particularly controversial in Bristol: a condemnation of the slave trade. Coleridge’s final lecture was on Pitt’s recently introduced hair-powder tax, a fine subject for his satirical wit, as democrats chose to wear their hair unpowdered anyway. Only ‘aristocrats’ would pay the guinea necessary for a licence to wear hair powder.

Meanwhile, all was not well in the Pantisocratic household. Coleridge exasperated Southey by his erratic working habits. Southey was by nature disciplined and organised, Coleridge wayward and chaotic. Even Coleridge’s appearance irritated Southey: untidy, unkempt and sometimes not entirely clean.³⁶ The strain began to show. Coleridge had agreed to give the fourth of Southey’s historical lectures – ‘On the Rise, Progress, and Decline of the Roman Empire’ – as it was a subject which he had particularly studied. At the end of Southey’s third lecture, therefore, it was announced that Coleridge would be giving the next. When the time came, ‘the room was thronged’ – but the lecturer failed to appear. After waiting half an hour, the disgruntled crowd dispersed. Coleridge was eventually found in his lodgings, smoking a pipe, deep in thought.

The next day, on a ramble up the Wye Valley with Cottle and the two Fricker sisters, Southey remonstrated with Coleridge. The two friends quarrelled, embarrassing Cottle, especially when each of the sisters entered the argument in support of her suitor. Afterwards, in the woods above Tintern, they lost their way as darkness descended, with Coleridge riding ahead on Cottle’s horse and shouting back encouragement, while Southey advanced supporting a sister on each arm, and the lame Cottle hobbled along behind, until at last they reached the inn.

Southey’s zeal for Pantisocracy was cooling. His priorities had changed; marriage to Edith was now in the forefront of his mind, and other considerations subsidiary. He began to express reservations about aspects of the scheme. Coleridge perceived his diminishing enthusiasm, and strove to keep him true to the principles to which they had devoted themselves. Southey was caught in a trap of his own making. Having advertised his own integrity so freely, having laid such stress on principle, having insisted to Coleridge that Pantisocracy was a duty, he found it difficult to withdraw. A succession of impassioned arguments ensued, followed by partial reconciliations. Each man accused the other of behaving coldly towards him. Strong words were exchanged, and tears shed. One night, just before they went to bed, Southey confessed that he had acted wrongly. But soon his manners became cold and gloomy again. It was like the break-up of a marriage. Poor George Burnett was a spectator of this contest; he watched aghast.

Then a wealthy friend offered Southey an annuity of £160, to begin the following autumn. Now that he had the prospect of some property, Southey found himself less inclined to share it. He put forward a new proposal: everything in Wales should be owned separately, except five or six acres. Coleridge reacted with indignation and contempt; Southey’s scheme amounted to rank apostasy: ‘In short, we were to commence Partners in a petty Farming Trade. This was the Mouse of which the Mountain Pantisocracy was at last safely delivered!’ From this time on, Coleridge kept up the appearance of a friendship with Southey – ‘but I locked up my heart from you’.

In August, Southey’s clergyman uncle Herbert Hill returned to England from Portugal. He had funded Southey’s education at Westminster and Oxford in the expectation that his nephew would follow his example, and he now wrote urging Southey to take Holy Orders. Apparently Hill was intimate with a bishop, and a post worth £300 a year was Southey’s for the asking. Southey informed his fellow lodgers of the offer one evening. ‘What answer have you returned?’ asked Coleridge. ‘None – Nor do I know what Answer I shall return,’ replied Southey, and retired to bed. Coleridge was incredulous; Southey had been as scathing as he was on the iniquity of the Church – indeed, had been so before they met (in December 1793, for example, Southey had written that to enter the Church ‘I must become contemptible infamous and perjured’³⁷). Burnett sat gaping, half-petrified at the possibility that his idol might abandon them. Coleridge wrote a letter to Southey that same night, frantically urging him not to ‘perjure himself’. The next morning he walked with Southey to Bath, insisting on the ‘criminality’ of such an action. Southey wavered, tempted by the prospect of a regular income that would at last allow him to marry Edith. After a struggle, he decided against the Church; but his uncle was determined to lure him away from Pantisocracy. Further inducements were placed in front of Southey to return to Oxford and study law – a course that Coleridge described as ‘more opposite to your avowed principles, if possible, than even the Church’. The temptations were proving too great for Southey, whose scruples disappeared one by one. He was now talking of ‘rejoining Pantisocracy in about 14 years’, citing Coleridge’s ‘indolence’* as a reason for his quitting. On 22 August 1795 Coleridge wrote bitterly to Cottle that Southey ‘leaves our Party’. On 1 September Southey quitted their shared lodgings in College Street. Their landlady was reduced to tears at his departure.

A week or two later Coleridge made his way back to west Somerset. On 19 September Poole’s cousin Charlotte noted in her journal that Tom had with him a friend by the name of ‘Coldridge: a young man of brilliant understanding, great eloquence, desperate fortune, democratick principle, and entirely led away by the feelings of the moment’. A poem by Poole (not known as a poet) addressed to ‘Coldridge’ – ‘Hail to thee, Coldridge, youth of various powers!’ – is dated seven days earlier. Presumably Coleridge stayed the intervening week with Poole at Nether Stowey. He may have visited Henry Poole at Shurton Court as well, because some time during September he composed a poem nearby, at Shurton Bars, where a murky, gently shelving sea recedes with the tide to reveal a shingle beach, broken by bars of exposed rock. ‘Lines Written at Shurton Bars’ was a response to a letter from Sara, in which she seems to have referred to chilly treatment from Southey and Edith. The growing estrangement from Southey was obviously prominent in Coleridge’s thoughts at the time. Poole’s poem refers to the same subject. On his return from Shurton to Bristol, Coleridge encountered Southey, who offered his usual handshake. Coleridge took Southey’s outstretched hand, and shook it ‘mechanically’. The significance of this handshake, or lack of it, subsequently became a point of contention between them.

In ‘Lines Written at Shurton Bars’ Coleridge quoted an expression borrowed from Wordsworth’s ‘An Evening Walk’. Such borrowing was a form of acknowledgement much practised at the time, and in fact Coleridge had already used another phrase of Wordsworth’s elsewhere.³⁸ A note to the published version of Coleridge’s poem would refer to ‘Mr. Wordsworth’ as ‘a Poet whose versification is occasionally harsh, and his diction too frequently obscure; but whom I deem unrivalled among the writers of the present day in manly sentiment, novel imagery, and vivid colouring’.³⁹ Obviously Coleridge had read and admired Wordsworth’s otherwise neglected poems published in 1793. What is striking about this note is that he should have rated Wordsworth so highly, on the evidence of so little.

Coleridge had decided to marry Sara. Though his addresses to her had at first been paid ‘from Principle not Feeling’, now his heart was engaged: ‘I love and I am beloved, and I am happy!’ He had found a cottage for them at Clevedon, a dozen or so miles west of the city, overlooking the Bristol Channel, for the modest rent of £5 per year. There they would live with George Burnett, the object of the Susquehanna delayed but not yet wholly abandoned. There Coleridge set ‘The Eolian Harp’, the first of what have since become known as his ‘conversation poems’, written in blank verse and usually addressed to an intimate companion, in which contemplation of nature evokes associated feelings, and leads to the resolution of an emotional or psychological problem. It would be hard to overstate the influence of these poems on Wordsworth and the later Romantic poets, and indeed on lyric poets ever since.⁴⁰ Some critics have argued that they are not so original as has sometimes been claimed; that Coleridge drew on earlier poets such as Cowper and Thomson. But many great writers have plundered the past. And even if this new style of poetry did have its antecedents, it was Coleridge’s conversation poems that shaped the future.

‘The Eolian Harp’ opens with Coleridge seated, Sara’s cheek resting on his arm, outside the cottage which will be theirs when they are married, gazing up at the evening sky. The scent of flowering plants fills the air, while the sea murmurs in the distance. Sensuousness permeates the poem, suffusing it with tender eroticism. Everything is in harmony, and Coleridge meditates on the conceit of the Aeolian harp, a stringed instrument that plays as the wind blows though it. Coleridge was fascinated by Hartley’s* belief that all sensation in the body takes place by means of vibrations along the nerves, like the strings of a musical instrument, and that each vibration leaves a trace that can be detected by the memory. Coleridge imagines ‘all of animated Nature’ as ‘organic harps’ that ‘tremble into thought’ as a divine ‘intellectual breeze’ blows through them. In the conclusion of the poem, Sara gently bursts the philosophical bubbles that arise within his ‘unregenerate mind’, and in doing so, lovingly leads this ‘sinful and most miserable man’ back to his maker. Thus erotic fulfilment is linked with redemption; the conflict between sacred and profane love is resolved.

On 4 October† they were married in Bristol’s St Mary Redcliffe, the vast church where Chatterton had claimed to have found Rowley’s manuscripts. Southey was not present at the wedding. He was still in an agony of indecision. He could not face Coleridge; they passed each other in the street without acknowledgement. In a letter he accused Coleridge of having withdrawn his friendship – though to others he maintained that Coleridge was more his friend than ever. Tongues were wagging in Bristol; Southey charged Coleridge with gross misrepresentation and wicked and calumnious falsehoods’. He complained to Grosvenor Charles Bedford that Coleridge had ‘behaved wickedly towards me’.⁴¹ Cottle attempted to reconcile them, without success. Southey’s uncle suggested an escape from his quandary: six months’ stay in Lisbon while he pondered his future. He hoped to prise his nephew away from an unfortunate attachment. Edith nobly pressed him to go, as did Southey’s mother. But he did not want it to be thought that he had abandoned Edith. Without telling his uncle, he married her ‘with the utmost privacy’ and left for Portugal a few days later.

Coleridge learned of this plan only a couple of days before. Wounded and angry, he sat down to denounce his former friend in a long, indignant, devastating letter:

O Selfish, money-loving Man! what Principle have you not given up? – Tho’ Death had been the consequence, I would have spit in that man’s Face and called him Liar, who should have spoken the last sentence concerning you, 9 months ago. For blindly did I esteem you. O God! That such a mind should fall in love with that low, dirty, gutter-grubbing Trull, WORLDLY PRUDENCE!!

To Robert Lovell, Southey had cited Coleridge’s indolence as his reason for quitting Pantisocracy, a thrust against a vulnerable part. ‘I have exerted myself more than I could have supposed myself capable,’ protested Coleridge – not just on his own behalf, but on Southey’s too. He instanced his contribution to Joan of Arc and his exertions to improve the remainder: ‘I corrected that and other Poems with greater interest, than I should have felt for my own.’ He had devoted his ‘whole mind and heart’ to Southey’s lectures: ‘you must be conscious, that all the Tug of Brain was mine: and that your Share was little more than Transcription’. He conceded that Southey wrote more easily:

The Truth is – You sate down and wrote – I used to saunter about and think what I should write. And we ought to appreciate our comparative Industry by the quantum of mental exertion, not by the particular mode of it: By the number of Thoughts collected, not by the number of Lines, thro’ which these Thoughts are diffused.

He retraced the history of their ‘connection’: ‘I did not only venerate you for your own Virtues, I prized you as the Sheet Anchor of mine!’ He detailed the ‘constant Nibblings’ that had ‘sloped your descent from Virtue’. Again and again, he said, he had been willing to give Southey the benefit of the doubt: ‘My Heart was never bent from you but by violent strength – and Heaven knows, how it leapt back to esteem and love you.’

Once Southey had allowed himself to be tempted by the Church, Coleridge had ceased to confide in him: ‘I studiously avoided all particular Subjects, I acquainted you with nothing relative to myself … I considered you as one who had fallen back into the Ranks … FRIEND is a very sacred appellation – You were become an Acquaintance, yet one for whom I felt no common tenderness.’ But now everything between them was at an end: ‘This will probably be the last time I shall have occasion to address you.’ He never expected to meet another whom he would love and admire so much. ‘You have left a large Void in my Heart – I know no man big enough to fill it.’⁴²

Perhaps through Godwin, Wordsworth met Basil Montagu, a young lawyer who was reading for the Bar. Though near contemporaries at Cambridge, they seem not to have known each other then. Now they rapidly became friends. Montagu was the illegitimate son of the fourth Earl of Sandwich, then First Lord of the Admiralty, and his mistress, the singer Martha Ray; in 1779 she had been shot outside a theatre where she had been performing by a disappointed suitor, the Reverend James Hackman, vicar of Wiveton in Norfolk, who had been hanged as a result. The story of Montagu’s mother’s murder had been a sensational scandal, recently revived by James Boswell in his Life of Johnson (1791). Poor Montagu was dogged by tragedy; his wife, whom he married soon after quitting Cambridge – against the wishes of his father, who never spoke to him again* – had died in childbirth, leaving him with an infant son, also called Basil. In the wreck of his happiness Montagu was ‘misled by passions wild and strong’; but his careful new friend gently but firmly led him away from these. ‘I consider my having met Wm Wordsworth the most fortunate event of my life,’ Montagu wrote in a memoir.

Montagu introduced Wordsworth to another recent Cambridge graduate, Francis Wrangham, who like Montagu was taking pupils in order to make ends meet. In 1793 – the year of Frend’s trial – Wrangham had failed to obtain an expected Cambridge Fellowship because he was rumoured to be friendly to the French Revolution. Since then he had been ‘vegetating on a curacy’ in Cobham, Surrey, where Wordsworth and Montagu often visited him. Wrangham was another radical, and a would-be poet; he had been in correspondence about his poetry with Coleridge, whom he had known at Cambridge. Now he and Wordsworth began collaborating on a verse satire based on Juvenal – a scholarly form of protest, which Wordsworth later abandoned.

By the summer of 1795, shortage of funds was becoming acute. After almost six months in London, nothing had come of Wordsworth’s plans to write for the newspapers, and none of the money from Raisley Calvert’s legacy had yet materialised. Four and a half years after leaving Cambridge, Wordsworth still had no career, no income and no home of his own. Perhaps worst of all, he was not writing. As Dorothy put it, ‘the unsettled way in which he has hitherto lived in London is altogether unfavourable to mental exertion’.⁴³ Meanwhile they still hoped to make a home together. Dorothy had not returned to Forncett, and was staying with friends in the north. There was an idea that she might come to London, and live by translating – a proposal which her Aunt Rawson dismissed as mad’.

Montagu and Wrangham had two young pupils, Azariah and John Frederick Pinney, whose father John Pretor Pinney was a wealthy ‘West Indian’, a Bristol merchant with extensive plantations on Nevis, a sugar-producing island in the Caribbean. As well as a handsome townhouse in Bristol, Pinney Senior owned Racedown Lodge, a large country house in north Dorset. This was not much used by the family, and had been advertised to let (at £42 per annum) as early as 1793, without finding a taker. The younger Pinney now suggested that Wordsworth might like to have it, rent free, with the proviso that he and his brother might come down for the occasional stay, principally to shoot.

Wordsworth seized the offer. Here was a chance to escape from the city, where things had not turned out as he had hoped. In the country, free from temptation or distraction, he could settle down to work. Moreover, it was an opportunity to live with Dorothy; Racedown would be ‘our little cottage’. There they could live simply and frugally, keeping a cow and growing vegetables in the kitchen garden. Dorothy would attend to most of the domestic chores, with the help of only one maidservant (she hoped for ‘a strong girl’). Together they would care for young Basil Montagu, whose father would pay £50 a year for his keep. There was a prospect of at least one other child, a little girl, and perhaps another boy as well, one of the younger Pinney brothers, then in his early teens. Dorothy was fond of children and had experience of looking after them. For her, this was a chance at last to ‘be doing something’:

… it is a painful idea that one’s existence is of very little use which I really have always been obliged to feel; above all it is painful when one is living upon the bounty of one’s friends, a resource of which misfortune may deprive one and then how irksome and difficult it is to find out other means of support, the mind is then unfitted, perhaps, for any new exertions, and continues always in a state of dependence, perhaps attended with poverty.⁴⁴

Outlining the arguments in favour of the Racedown ‘scheme’ to her friend Jane Pollard (who had recently married John Marshall, a linen manufacturer), Dorothy argued that it would give her brother ‘such opportunities of studying as I hope will be not only advantageous to his mind but his purse’. She hoped that it ‘may put William into a way of getting a more permanent establishment’.⁴⁵

With the money for the two children, and interest on the capital from Raisley Calvert’s legacy (which was at last beginning to trickle through), Dorothy was confident of an annual income of at least £170 or £180. This should be enough to enable them to live comfortably, and even to make some provision for the future.* There was the prospect of a further £200 a year if her brother’s ‘great hopes’ of having the Pinney boy entrusted to him as tutor were realised.

It was agreed that Wordsworth would travel to Bristol, where he would stay at the Pinneys’ house in Great George Street until Dorothy was able to join him and they could journey on together to Racedown. No doubt John Pretor Pinney wanted to take a good look at this young man who would be occupying his country house. For Wordsworth, there was the added benefit of an opportunity to make new contacts in a city with its own flourishing intellectual life. Among those he met in Bristol, almost in passing, was a young man who had been making a good deal of noise, and whose name he had almost certainly heard already, †

Nobody knows for certain where or when Wordsworth and Coleridge first met, what the circumstances were, or what was said. There are three contradictory stories, each based on reminiscences long after the event. The confusion is not altogether surprising; it is often hard to remember how we met someone who afterwards becomes familiar. Though these two would later become so important to each other, they could scarcely have anticipated this at their first encounter.

What is known is that they met in Bristol during Wordsworth’s five-week stay in the city from around 21 August until 26 September 1795. The proof is in a letter Wordsworth wrote to Mathews from Racedown in October: ‘Coleridge was at Bristol part of the time I was there. I saw but little of him. I wished indeed to have seen more – his talent appears to me very great.’⁴⁷ There is a tradition that the two met at John Pretor Pinney’s house, where Wordsworth was staying, but this may be no more than a guess. One reason for doubting it is the awkwardness of Coleridge’s being received at the house of a prominent ‘West Indian’ only a few months after delivering a public lecture condemning the slave trade. The Bristol Observer had commented on the lecture as ‘proof of the detestation in which he [Coleridge] holds that infamous traffic’. It is hard to imagine Coleridge comfortable as the guest of one of the largest slave-owners in the city, or that Pinney would have welcomed him into his home.

Fifteen years later, the painter Joseph Farington noted in his diary that the two poets had met at a political debating society, ‘where on one occasion Wordsworth spoke with so much force & eloquence that Coleridge was captivated by it & sought to know Him’.⁴⁸ His note was based on a conversation with Lady Beaumont, a woman who had come to know both men well (but who had not known them at the time); though one might suspect that in being told to her, and then by her, the story had become garbled, and that Coleridge rather than Wordsworth had been the speaker. Another cause for doubt is the explanation of how they became acquainted. Coleridge was on record as an admirer of Wordsworth’s poetry; he would not have needed to hear Wordsworth speak in order to want to know him.

Half a century afterwards, Wordsworth tried to recall the circumstances of the meeting for Coleridge’s daughter Sara. Confessing that he did not have ‘as distinct a remembrance as he could wish’, he told her ‘the impression upon his mind’ was that he had seen her father and her mother together with her uncle Southey and her aunt Edith ‘in a lodging in Bristol’.⁴⁹ If Wordsworth’s memory can be relied upon, the Frickers’ home in Redcliffe Hill seems the most likely location for the meeting – though why Wordsworth should have been there remains unexplained. One should remember that at this stage neither of the couples was married. The Fricker sisters had attracted plenty of unpleasant comment because of their association with the Pantisocrats; they would surely not have wanted to risk their reputations further by visiting the young men’s cramped bachelor lodgings in College Street.⁵⁰

There is another difficulty with the story. ‘I met with Southey also,’ Wordsworth continued his letter to Mathews – which makes it sound as if this happened on a different occasion. By now relations between Coleridge and Southey were strained; Coleridge later claimed to have used the most scrupulous care’ to avoid Southey after his return from Shurton in mid-September. Wordsworth went on to describe Southey’s qualities: ‘his manners pleased me exceedingly and I have every reason to think very highly of his powers of mind … I recollect your mentioning you had met Southey and thought him a coxcomb. This surprises me much, as I never saw a young man who seemed to me to have less of that character …’ At Southey’s invitation Wordsworth read some passages of Joan of Arc, then in press; and Southey contributed a couple of lines to Wordsworth’s Juvenalian satire – which Wordsworth later told Wrangham were the two best verses in it.⁵¹ This sounds like a relaxed encounter, more relaxed than one might have expected had Coleridge been there at the same time. Perhaps, then, Wordsworth’s memory should not be relied upon, and in fact he met Coleridge and Southey separately.

Despite so much uncertainty, the available fragments of evidence make it possible to date their meeting to within the space of only a few days.