Читать книгу Coleridge: Darker Reflections - Richard Holmes - Страница 23

Now he had returned home after two and a half years of wandering, Coleridge suddenly felt that he had no real home to return to. He walked down the Strand in a dirty shirt, full of dismay, hearing everyone talk of the death of Pitt and the illness of Charles James Fox, the political era of his youth sliding into the past. Now the news was of blockades, war shortages, conscription, unrest in the country. Like all exiles, he felt he had come back to a changed world which had moved on without him. Should he stay in London, go north to Keswick and his wife, agree to meet the Wordsworths in Leicestershire, or even return to his old family haunts in the West Country?

In the event he would try all these over the next twelve months. For the moment he needed work, money and advice. The one thing he could not face was an immediate confrontation with Sara Coleridge, and he did not write to her directly for a month. Instead he sent messages round to his old editor Daniel Stuart at the Courier offices, and to Charles Lamb at India House, and dashed off letters to Southey and Wordsworth announcing his return to England rather like a piece of flotsam washed up by a lucky tide.

‘I am now going to Lamb’s – Stuart is at Margate; all are out of town; I have no one to advise me – I am shirtless & almost penniless…My MSS are all – excepting two pocket-books – either in the Sea or…carried back to Malta.” He had not settled “any rational plan”, but he could write “more tranquilly” to them than to Mrs Coleridge (but they should pass on his news).¹

It was Stuart who replied immediately with a credit for £50, kind enquiries about his health, and a businesslike suggestion for articles about the careers of Pitt and Fox, the Mediterranean war, the Continental blockade, or anything else Coleridge liked to turn his hand to. He also invited him to Margate, simply to talk about his life and his future.