Читать книгу Coleridge: Early Visions - Richard Holmes - Страница 10

The large West Country family in which he grew up was in many ways a remarkable one. Eight of them were boys (one died in infancy), and all showed talent either for soldiering or scholarship. Their father, the Reverend John Coleridge, was not only vicar of Ottery, but also headmaster of the local King’s Grammar School, a man who inspired them with notions of duty and excellence which had a profound effect on their upbringing. He referred to them, with Old Testament pride, as his “tribe”. All the boys were securely launched in their careers at the time of his sudden death in 1781, except for little Sam who was not quite nine. The effects of this early bereavement were to run very deep for the youngest child.

In origin the Coleridges were a stalwart and undistinguished Devon clan of yeoman farmers and small traders, from three parishes west of Exeter, which themselves sound like some sort of folksong – Dunsford, Drewsteignton, and Doddiscombsleigh.⁶ If they were renowned for anything, it was for fertility. Coleridge used to say that his grandfather was a bastard brought up by the parish, and apprenticed as a woollen-draper in Crediton, where he only briefly deviated into respectability. If there was ever a sans-culotte revolution, he could safely deny “one drop of Gentility”.⁷

Another tale he told, emphasised eccentricity. “His grandfather, a weaver, half-poet and half-madman…used to ask the passing beggar to dinner in Oriental phrase, ‘Will my lord turn in hither, and eat with his servant?’ – and washed his feet.”⁸

Nevertheless, his father, the Reverend John Coleridge, was an example of the historic rise of an English middle-class family in three generations; and his grandchildren were to be a successful race of judges, bishops, and senior academics. This pressure for family success, closely associated with Sam’s elder brothers, was to have a subtle and pervasive influence throughout Coleridge’s literary life – a profession where “success” and respectability are delusive concepts.

The Reverend John Coleridge was born in Crediton, north of Exeter, in January 1719. He obtained an exhibition to the local grammar school, and would have gone on directly to university but for the bankruptcy of his father, the woollen-draper. The reasons for this downfall are unknown, but there is some suggestion of heavy drinking, which can often be a family inheritance. Coleridge liked to believe that John was a dreamy and unworldly man – “a perfect Parson Adams” in an oft-repeated phrase – and would tell comic anecdotes of his father’s scholarly distraction, in long evening sessions with Gillman at Highgate, “till the tears ran down his face”.⁹ This may have been so in later life, but there is a characteristic element of myth-making in Coleridge’s accounts of John’s saintly simplicities. As a young man he seems to have been determined and ambitious, riding rough-shod over his various setbacks. Temporarily cheated of university, he took a schoolmastership at the nearby village of Clysthdon, married a local Crediton girl, by whom he had four daughters, and continued to study hard and somehow to save money. In 1747, at the age of twenty-eight, he was able to apply for matriculation as a mature student at Sidney Sussex, Cambridge – a triumph over his straitened circumstances.

Here he proved himself a brilliant student of classics and Hebrew, so that by 1749 he had qualified for his first major appointment as headmaster of Squire’s Latin School at South Molton, and also obtained the curacy of nearby Mariansleigh. On the death of his first wife in 1751, he did not repine but promptly married Ann Bowdon, the handsome and capable daughter of an Exmoor farmer, who had all the ambition and drive of a perfect headmaster’s wife.

He also began to publish – first as an “ingenious contributor” to the Gentleman’s Magazine: and then as an author of scholarly text-books. There followed a series of worthy productions: a Hebrew edition of the Bible (co-edited); a short grammatical textbook for schools (1759); a Dissertation on the Book of Judges (1768); and a Critical Latin Grammar (1772). In 1776, he privately printed his own political statement, A Fast Sermon, deploring the outbreak of the American War of Independence, in which he rather pithily observed that “you might as well imagine the Almighty to create the Sun, Moon, and Stars, and then permit them to move at random, as to create Man, and not ordain Government.” One may gather from this that John Coleridge was no Anglican radical. His literary turn even reached the stage, for he adapted a Latin comedy by Terence, which he sent to Garrick at Drury Lane, under the rather tantalising title of The Fair Barbarian.10

Coleridge gently deflated his father’s achievements – “the truth is, my Father was not a first-rate Genius – he was however a first-rate Christian”. He suggested that his greatest contribution to scholarship was the re-naming of the ablative case in Latin grammar with the “sonorous and expressive” term of the “Quippe-quare-quale quia-quidditive Case!”¹¹ But the Reverend John Coleridge’s works were subscribed by many West Country notables, including the local MP, Judge Buller, and the local landowner Sir Stafford Northcote. In 1760 their patronage brought him the headmastership of the King Henry VIII Grammar School at Ottery St Mary, a remarkable achievement for the bankrupt draper’s son, at the age of forty-one.

At the end of this year, on the death of the incumbent, the Reverend Richard Holmes MA (a man who has left no significant trace), John Coleridge was also appointed vicar of St Mary’s, thus establishing himself as one of the leading figures in the town. His rapidly growing family soon occupied both the School House (where there were a dozen or so private pupils) and the Vicarage. These were situated in the cluster of old medieval buildings below the church in a commanding position on the top of the Cornhill of Ottery St Mary’s. There is a surviving eighteenth-century aquatint showing the Vicarage, divided from the churchyard by a sunken lane. Here a stout, old-fashioned gentleman in clerical knee-breeches and broad-brimmed hat is mounting a horse. This is the Reverend John preparing for a pastoral visit.

Next door, Sir Stafford Northcote kept his town residence in the Warden House; and at the end of the sunken lane stood Chanter’s House in extensive grounds, eventually to become the family home of the most successful of the tribe. By the time of little Sam’s birth in 1772, the three surviving half-sisters (“my aunts”) were married and living away; and the eldest boy, John, then aged eighteen, had already departed as a soldier to India. The remaining family at Ottery consisted of William, then sixteen, who would prove a scholar; James, thirteen, who would become a successful career soldier in England; Edward, twelve, destined to become a clergyman and “the wit” of the family; George, eight, who would become a headmaster like his father; Luke, seven, who would train as a doctor; Anne, five, universally loved and affectionately known as “Nancy” by all her brothers; and Francis, two, the most handsome and dashing of the boys, who would also go to India. “All my Brothers are remarkably handsome,” observed Coleridge mournfully, “but they were as inferior to Francis as I am to them.”¹² This question of “inferiority” was to be a recurring anxiety of the youngest, uncertain whether he was the Benjamin or the black sheep.