THERE was in the city of Bristol in 1795 a group of young gentlemen, educated young gentlemen, clever and ambitious and very radical young gentlemen, who had decided that England was reactionary and corrupt, and, as there seemed no likelihood of reform, let alone revolution, they were going to emigrate and found their own Utopian community on the banks of the River Susquehanna in America. They’d never been there, nor were they quite sure where the Susquehanna flowed, but they liked the mellifluous sound of its name. The scheme was called Pantisocracy. ‘The equal government of all’ was their paraphrase of the title. Twelve young gentlemen, with twelve young ladies, would set up an agricultural commune where everyone was equal. Each man would have to labour for only three hours a day. According to their reading of the latest economic theories, by Adam Smith, who maintained that only one in twenty men was productive anyway, this would be sufficient to support the whole community. Everyone could hold his own religious and political beliefs and all children of the community would be educated together. They hadn’t quite decided on whether marriages could be dissolved at will by any one partner, but they were working on it. The sum of £125 each, they calculated, would be enough to get a boat, sail out of Bristol and start their brave new life together.
It is hard not to smile at the idealism of it all, though, if you too happen to be young and idealistic and radical, you perhaps won’t smile but think it perfectly wonderful—the sort of thing you might at this very moment be looking for. Two hundred years later, such notions still attract and similar communities, with a few modern refinements, are still being set up. The leaders of the Pantisocratic scheme were two struggling young poets: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, aged twenty-three, and Robert Southey, aged twenty-one. In their lives and hard times and rebellious attitudes, they were very similar to each other—and to another struggling young poet who, that very summer, was making plans to travel to the West Country to await his sister.
Coleridge was born in Ottery St Mary in Devon in 1772, the tenth child of the Vicar of Ottery, who died when Samuel was seven. When he was nine, he was sent away to school in London, to Christ’s Hospital, where he remained for the next eight years. He was a brilliant scholar, something of a child prodigy, but he was lonely and unhappy for much of his time at school, though he began a life-long friendship with a boy some three years younger than himself, Charles Lamb, and fell in love with a girl called Mary Evans, who was the sister of another school friend.
He went up to Jesus College, Cambridge, as a sizar, in 1791—the year that Wordsworth went down—and started off there in excellent style, winning medals and prizes; but his enthusiasm for Cambridge soon waned. He devoted his time to talking, not working, to parties, radical politics and running up debts; then, when his girl friend Mary rejected him, he ran away from Cambridge and enlisted in the 15th Regiment of Light Dragoons, under the name of Silas Tomkyn Comberbacke. It was a defiant, melodramatic gesture of a sort which Coleridge increasingly took to when, as he often believed, the world and his friends didn’t quite understand him or had let him down. He was in the Dragoons as a private for several months, puzzling the officers by speaking Greek and pleasing his fellow privates by writing their love-letters, until at last his family tracked him down and persuaded him to return to Cambridge.
He didn’t stay long at Cambridge, leaving at the end of the summer term in 1794 without taking a degree. He set off on a walking tour to Wales with a friend, stopping first of all at Oxford to see some old school friends. This stop stretched to three weeks, because in Oxford he met Robert Southey, then a student at Balliol. This was when they first became inflamed with their wonderful joint scheme of Pantisocracy.…
Robert Southey was born in Bristol in 1774, the second of nine children of a local linen draper. When he was two, Robert was taken off by an aunt, Miss Tyler (his mother’s half-sister), a wealthy, snobbish, eccentric lady who decided she could give him a better home than his own impoverished father. He spent most of his childhood with this strange lady, sleeping in her bed with her till he was six years old. As she didn’t rise till about eleven, and he usually awoke at six, he was forced to lie for hours, staring at the ceiling. She wouldn’t let him play in the garden, for fear that he got dirty. It made for a rather dreary, lonely childhood, but it is supposed to have encouraged in him self-sufficiency and a sense of duty.
Another relation, an uncle who was a clergyman, paid for Southey’s education. Like Coleridge, he was sent away to a London public school, Westminster, which, along with Eton, was considered the best of the day. Compared with the homely comforts of Hawkshead Grammar School, it sounds frightening. Older boys poured cold water in his ears when he was asleep and then held him out of a window by one leg. The curriculum was very old-fashioned, consisting mainly of Latin and Greek learned by rote, and the whole school of 250 boys was taught in one big room, divided down the middle by a curtain. Like Coleridge, Southey didn’t like his school, but made some good friends there.
Southey’s memory of the news of the French Revolution—which happened when he was at Westminster—is very typical of young, idealistic youths of the day: ‘Few persons but those who have lived in it can conceive or comprehend what a visionary world seemed to open up. Old things seemed passing away and nothing was dreamt of it but the regeneration of the human race.’ He became a fierce radical, anti-Church, anti-government and against most forms of discipline, particularly his school’s. In 1792, he was expelled from Westminster for writing a violent attack on the school in a magazine he’d helped to found, the Flagellant. It was a full frontal attack on corporal punishment, saying that those who practised it (his reverend teachers) were worse than heathens and unfit to instruct youth. His headmaster not only expelled him but warned Christ Church, the Oxford college about to take him. ‘I will never submit,’ wrote Southey. ‘Should I be rejected at Oxford the grave is always open—there at least I shall not be molested.’ Ah, the passions of youth!
Balliol took him instead, in a fit of liberalism, but just as he went up, in 1792, he had some family misfortune which clouded his next few years, just as happened with Wordsworth. His father, who’d never been much of a success as a draper (he really wanted to be a farmer), was arrested for debt. Miss Tyler, the dreaded aunt, rescued his father financially, but he fell ill and died within a few months. Southey’s mother was forced to start taking lodgers to survive.
Southey was already a committed radical when he arrived at Oxford. One of his first acts of protest was to go into a formal dinner with his hair unpowdered. As we know from Wordsworth’s undergraduate days, powered hair was de rigueur. Barbers were on duty for two hours every morning, just to see to the young gentlemen. Pitt, whom all the radicals hated, had put a tax on powder, and this was the specific cause of complaint. (Next door, at Trinity, Walter Savage Landor, known to his contemporaries as the ‘Mad Jacobin’, also chose the same means of protest, though he and Southey never met till much later in life.)
During the next two years, Southey continued to indulge in radical politics, refusing all pleas from his uncle, who was paying for his education, to go into the Church and settle down. He hated the Established Church. But he knew he would have no money whatsoever, unless he somehow kept in with his uncle, so he tried medicine one term, but gave up. He then tried the Civil Service, with no more luck. He’d been writing poetry at a furious rate since school and had started writing a dramatic epic poem, then the fashion with literary-minded undergraduates, based on the story of Joan of Arc but really a pro-Revolution diatribe. He fancied a literary career, but, with no private income, he had decided it was impossible. When Coleridge chanced into his life, during that summer vacation, Southey, with his final year looming up, had just resolved that the only solution was to emigrate. There seemed nothing else he could do in life.
The finding of a kindred spirit, when Southey thought he was alone against the world, was a revelation. It all fitted in. They would set up their ideal community together. Coleridge, after three weeks of incessant chat, went off to complete his tour of Wales with his friend. Southey decided he might as well leave and not take his degree. As he was going off for ever to the New World, what was the point of a boring Oxford degree?
He went home to Bristol, where Coleridge joined him, and they worked on plans for their new life in America. Southey introduced him to his Bristol friends, such as Robert Lovell, with whom he was writing a book of poems, and the three Fricker sisters. Mrs Fricker, the widow of a failed sugar-pan manufacturer, was a family friend. Robert Lovell was engaged to one of the Fricker girls. Southey started going out with another, Edith, and was soon about to become engaged. Coleridge became friendly with the third one, Sara. All six of them, the three young men and their three Fricker girls, declared themselves passionate Pantisocrats, all bound for America.
It was a very fertile time for Southey and Coleridge. They sparked each other off and wrote numbers of poems and articles, sometimes literally together, doing alternate sections. Southey completed a dramatic poem about Wat Tyler, the early radical, which was accepted for publication but never appeared. Perhaps his publisher thought, wisely, that it would damage his reputation and his future.
They went on walking tours together round the West Country. On one jaunt, to visit a wealthy tanner called Thomas Poole, an older, republican friend of Coleridge’s in Somerset, they were forced to spend the night sleeping in a garret. ‘Coleridge is a vile bed fellow,’ wrote Southey to a friend, ‘and I slept but ill. In the morning I rose—and lo! we were fastened in. They certainly took us for footpads and had bolted the door on the outside for fear we should rob the house.’
They were a pretty alarming couple, in their political passions as much as in their appearance. Poole decided that, of the two young men Coleridge was the more fluent and talented, with striking abilities, but that he wasn’t very prudent, though he promised to be ‘as sober and rational as his most sober friends could wish’. He found Southey less splendid in his abilities, but ‘more violent in his principles than even Coleridge himself’. Coleridge was at least a Unitarian, and believed in God, but Southey, so Poole found, had no religious views. ‘In religion, shocking to say in a mere Boy as he is, I fear he wavers between Deism and Atheism.’
Towards the end of the year, 1794, Coleridge went off to London, to try and place some of their poems and to drum up interest and customers for Pantisocracy. He went back to his old school to see some of the senior boys, and spent a lot of time hanging around the ‘Salutation and Cat’ in Newgate Street, which meant that he wasn’t as sober as he might have been, spending many hours in ‘that nice little smoky room’, as Charles Lamb described it, ‘with all its associated train of pipes, tobacco, egghot, Welsh rarebit, metaphysics and poetry’.
Coleridge tried to make contact again with Mary Evans, the girl who’d already rejected him—an occurrence which, in Coleridge’s case, always spurred him to greater protestations of love—but got nowhere. Instead, or perhaps at the same time, he started a flirtation with another young lady, a Miss Brunton—purely of course to help him get over the first love. ‘Her exquisite beauty and uncommon accomplishments might have cured one passion by another.’
When Southey heard, he was most upset. Southey might not have held any religious views, but he was certainly a most moral young man, very keen on duty and principles. He wrote a severe letter to Coleridge, reprimanding him for his behaviour, telling him to come back to Sara Fricker, to whom he was as good as betrothed.
Coleridge in turn accused Southey of being self-righteous: ‘Having never erred, you feel more indignation at error than pity for it. 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 desires, and on removal of a desultory appetite to be perhaps not displeased with her absence! Enough. Mark you, Southey! I will do my duty.’ But still he didn’t return, so Southey in the New Year went to fetch him. He came back quickly, and Southey and Coleridge moved into lodgings together in College Street, Bristol, where they remained for the next seven months, their friendship, their writing and their Pantisocracy as strong as ever.
The numbers were growing and by now they included Mrs Southey (Robert’s mother) and Mrs Fricker, as well as Miss Tyler’s manservant, Shadrach Weeks, though Coleridge protested when he discovered that the others were proposing that ‘Shad’ should also be their servant in America, ridiculing the idea of ‘unequal equals’. However, that difference was settled and they each got down to the final business of getting their £125 together.
A local bookseller, a young and enterprising man called Joseph Cottle, who’d already agreed to publish some of Coleridge’s and Southey’s poems, arranged a series of public lectures for them in Bristol, on politics and theology. Coleridge was a brilliant public speaker, immensely knowledgeable and fluent, and his lectures were very successful amongst the young radicals of Bristol. Southey was competent rather than sparkling but his lectures also did well. Coleridge asked to give an extra lecture in the series Southey was running, on the ‘Rise, Progress and Decline of the Roman Empire’, as he said it was a subject he had particularly studied. Southey agreed he could do it, but on the evening in question, Coleridge didn’t turn up and no lecture was given.
The next day, they happened to be going on a little excursion to Tintern Abbey, given by Cottle for his two young protégés and their respective fiancées, Edith and Sara Fricker. After dinner, Southey brought up the subject of the missing lecture, and the most heated argument ensued. It went on for hours, with the two poets shouting at each other, the Fricker sisters hanging on to and defending their respective fiancés, while Cottle tried to calm things down. They lost their way coming home, as it was so late. Coleridge tried to go off on horseback for help—after all, had he not been a dragoon at one time—but they ended up having to spend the night in Tintern.
This then was the state of play between the two young men when Wordsworth chanced to arrive in Bristol—and into their lives. William stayed at the house of Mr Pinney, the rich sugar merchant, for five weeks, and either met them there or perhaps attended their lectures. He was drawn to both of them, in just a few brief meetings, particularly to Coleridge, who had read, it turned out, his An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches and praised them highly. Coleridge had, coincidentally, discussed them at Cambridge with young Christopher Wordsworth, not knowing that he was eventually going to meet his brother.
William wrote to a young London friend, Matthews, who already knew the two of them:
Coleridge was at Bristol part of the time I was there. I saw but little of him. I wished indeed I had seen more—his talents appear to me very great, I met with Southey also. His manners pleased me exceedingly and I have every reason to think very highly of his powers of mind. He is about publishing an epic poem on the subject of the Maid of Orleans. From the specimens I have seen I am inclined to think it will have many beauties. 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 have less of that character.…
Wordsworth, of course, didn’t know about the growing differences and rows between the two friends, which very soon afterwards led to the collapse of Pantisocracy. This took place during that summer, though there was no actual date when the scheme was called off. The two just drifted apart, as most of the participants began to realize that the whole idea was slightly mad and that temperamental differences, especially between Coleridge and Southey, would never allow it to work.
Coleridge put the blame on Southey for the final collapse. Southey’s aunt, Miss Tyler, was absolutely furious when she heard about the scheme and about his engagement to the Fricker girl, whom she dismissed as a mere seamstress, not fit for her nephew, to whom she had devoted so many years and so much money. She said she would cut him off completely, would give him no more money and that she never wanted to see or hear from him again—and she never did.
But Southey’s uncle, the cleric, still took an interest and suggested that he should now accompany him for a few months to Lisbon, where he was chaplain to the British community. This would enable him to get over his ridiculous schemes. Southey, surprisingly, agreed to the plan. At the same time, he was offered an annuity from a wealthy school friend which would start being paid the following year, when he came of age, and provide him with £160 a year.
Coleridge cut Southey in the street in Bristol when he heard he was going to Portugal, but Coleridge nonetheless married his Fricker sister. He must have been keen enough on her by this time to be more than just doing his duty, but he later blamed Southey for forcing him into the marriage. Southey married his Fricker girl the next month, November 1795, and then left straight from the church doors for Portugal. So they became brothers-in-law just at the time when they’d ceased to be friends.
Coleridge moved to a Somerset cottage with his bride and began work on a new magazine, feeling let down by Southey, whom he now considered even more of a self-righteous prig: ‘You are lost to me, because you are lost to Virtue.’
Wordsworth, therefore, had come along at the perfect time, at least for Coleridge. Coleridge now had a new friend to take Southey’s place, someone equally radical, equally interested in poetry and literature, but without all that moralizing and censoriousness. It was true they’d hardly met in Bristol, but Coleridge got Wordsworth’s Dorset address and started corresponding. Coleridge was one of nature’s enthusiasts, a man of instant passions, who enjoyed all the pleasures. After those first brief meetings, he’d already decided that in Wordsworth he’d met a giant.
Racedown Lodge is a square-built house near the hamlet of Birdsmoor Gate, about half-way between Lyme Regis and Crewkerne in the rolling Dorset downs. The coast is about six miles away—within sight, if you pick a good day and a reasonable mound. The country isn’t wild, like the Lake District fells, and in fact today the hills seem positively cosy and suburban, with the influx of retired gentlefolk and a summer stream of Cortinas on all the roads. But in 1795, when the Wordsworths arrived, it was wild in the sense of being isolated and undeveloped. The scattered farming communities led a rather lonely, impoverished life. William and Dorothy were both much struck by the poverty of the local peasants, many of whom lived in primitive huts, begging or stealing to keep themselves alive. In the Lake District valleys, surrounded by the high fells and forced to be self-sufficient, the people of the small towns and villages somehow coped better with their poor and deprived.
We are now at Racedown [wrote William], and both as happy as people can be who live in perfect solitude. We do not see a soul. Now and then we meet a miserable peasant in the road. The country people here are wretchedly poor; ignorant and overwhelmed with every vice that usually attends ignorance in that class, viz, lying and stealing.
We plant cabbages and if retirement, in its full perfection, be as powerful in working transformations as one of Ovid’s Gods, you may suspect that into cabbages we shall be transformed.…
They got no newspapers and, worst of all for Dorothy, considering her passion for letter-writing, they were miles from a post office. All provisions had to come from Crewkerne, seven miles away. But they were together, sharing the same simple pleasures, walking, gardening, hedging, reading and, most of all, working. William had written very little poetry in the previous two years, what with all his radical agitation in London, and, fuelled and cosseted and inspired by Dorothy, his secretary and kindred soul, he now set to work with a renewed energy. Unfortunately, his head was still full of turbulent ideas about revolution and violence, all mixed up with his own mental and moral dilemmas, and the poetry of this period suffered in consequence. It seemed to be something he had to work out of his system, though Dorothy, who had little interest in philosophical topics, was gradually weaning him back to nature.
William started work on a full-length tragedy which was called The Borderers and was set in thirteenth-century England. This was his only attempt at a play. It doesn’t seem to have been much of a pleasure to write—nor is it much pleasure to read. It would seem that at several stages he suffered severe depressions at Racedown, perhaps even teetering on the verge of a mental breakdown; but Dorothy pulled him through.
They had only one child with them, little Basil, as the other one had not arrived after all, and they discussed his upbringing endlessly, worrying about how to stop him telling lies (they decided that, because they asked him silly, unsuitable questions, he told lies in return), and how to stop him crying (putting him in a room on his own till he stopped, which they said worked in the end). There was an old caretaker who lived on the premises, a servant of Mr Pinney, who kept a rather suspicious eye on them, though they looked after themselves completely. ‘I have lately been living upon air and the essence of carrots, cabbages, turnips,’ wrote William.
The Pinney boys brought them news of life in the big city of Bristol, especially news of Coleridge, who was also working on a play which Sheridan, at Covent Garden in London, had commissioned. When the Pinneys came, the caretaker unlocked the best glasses and crockery from a cupboard and they had big, jolly meals. After that, the Wordsworths went back to carrots.
During his stay at Racedown, William wrote his only signed letter to a newspaper (he later wrote some anonymously). It was to the Weekly Entertainer in Sherborne and was in defence of Fletcher Christian, his Cockermouth school contemporary, whose actions during the mutiny on the Bounty were then a source of great public discussion. Christian’s brother, the professor of law, had organized a pamphlet in his support, and it was noticeable that amongst those who signed it were several members of the Wordsworth and Cookson families—old friends sticking together.
William went to Bristol once or twice on his own, to see Cottle, who was interested in publishing his poems, and to look up ‘those two extraordinary young men, Southey and Coleridge’. He couldn’t have seen Southey on this occasion (20 November 1795), as Southey had by then gone to Portugal, but he saw Coleridge again and Cottle sent him a copy of Southey’s Joan of Arc which Cottle had just published. When William read it, Southey rather went down in his estimation, though he might have been influenced in this by Coleridge: ‘You were right about Southey,’ William wrote to his old friend in London, Matthews. ‘He is certainly a coxcomb, and has proved it completely by the preface to his Joan of Arc, an epic poem which he has just published. This preface is indeed a very conceited performance and the poem, though in some passages of first rate excellence, is on the whole of a very inferior execution.’
Several visitors came to stay with them during their two years of seclusion at Racedown, such as Basil Montagu—who had run out of money and wasn’t keeping up his payments on the annuity—and Mary Hutchinson, their old Penrith friend, now living in Yorkshire with relations. She stayed several months and provided invaluable company for Dorothy—and for William as well, no doubt, though he went off on one of his Bristol trips just as she arrived. ‘My friend Mary Hutchinson is staying with us,’ wrote Dorothy. ‘She is one of the best girls in the world and we are as happy as human beings can be; that is when William is at home, for you cannot imagine how dull we feel and what a vacuum his loss has occasioned, but this is the first day; tomorrow we shall be better.’
The two girls weren’t completely unoccupied while William was away. There was Basil to look after, plus a lot of gardening and cooking. Dorothy was also sewing shirts, for relations and friends, to make some money, and both she and Mary worked on William’s poems, copying them out for him. In those days, before the invention of typewriters and copying machines, a writer had to be a writer in every sense, unless he could persuade someone to take dictation, which Dorothy often did, walking with him as he spouted and making notes for him. Once a poem had been taken down to the poet’s satisfaction, it was vital to get as many copies made as possible, before it could be lost or destroyed. A publisher needed at least one copy, and Wordsworth, like Coleridge and Southey, was always sending offhand-written copies of his poems, or chunks of his latest writings, to friends, or likely friends and contacts, for their comments and appreciation.
William was soon sending samples of his poems to Coleridge, and getting back copious and excellent critical advice. Coleridge was as clear and decisive as Dorothy in his instinctive observations, but, unlike Dorothy, he had an educated mind, a powerful intellect, great knowledge and insight, and, as a writer himself, could creatively help Wordsworth to improve or alter his work. Wordsworth was tremendously impressed. As a young man, he was never verbally very fluent; even on paper, his prose wasn’t as succinct at expressing his reactions and opinions as Coleridge. Most of all, he didn’t have the critical faculty of Coleridge, especially when it came to his own work. Like many writers, he took outside criticism very badly.
But he could see that Coleridge was his friend, his fan even, who criticized him only for his own good. It was the combination of Dorothy and Coleridge—one settling him down as a person, the other sorting out his creative problems—that was the making of William. This period, when they both came together intimately into his life, two lifeboats upon which he could depend, enabling him to cruise majestically forward, was the most crucial in his whole writing life. Who is to say which was the greater influence? Who is to say exactly what each gave him? But after the turbulence and indecision and wrong turnings, the isolations and depressions, of the previous ten years, his genius now began to flower.
The great meeting between all three came in June 1797, a momentous day in each of their lives, when Coleridge came out to Racedown to see William at his home and meet Dorothy in the flesh. They’d corresponded for two years and he and William had had occasional meetings, but it was the first time all three came face to face.
‘We both have a distinctive remembrance of his arrival,’ William recalled more than forty years later. ‘He did not keep to the high road but leaped over a gate and bounded down a pathless field by which he cut off an angle.’
Coleridge was living about forty miles away, at Nether Stowey in Somerset, in a cottage provided by Thomas Poole, his wealthy patron, who lived next door. He was in the first flush of marriage, and seemed happy and content with Sara and their first child, Hartley, who’d been born the previous year. His differences with Southey had partly been forgotten. As brothers-in-law, they were in occasional contact once more, especially when Southey, and his Fricker wife, returned from Portugal and moved to London. Southey had decided to read for the bar and get himself a proper profession, not relying on odd pieces of writing in the way Coleridge and Wordsworth were both trying to do.
Coleridge stayed with the Wordsworths for three weeks, then persuaded them to come back with him to his Nether Stowey cottage. They all somehow managed to cram into the little cottage, with Mrs Coleridge and the baby, and were joined a week later by another visitor, Charles Lamb, Coleridge’s London friend.
The Wordsworths never moved back to Racedown. Such was the excitement of life with their new friend, that when he found them a house to rent, some four miles away, they decided to take it immediately. This was Alfoxden House, a much larger house than Racedown, standing on the edge of the Quantock Hills (it is now a hotel).
‘Here we are,’ wrote Dorothy, ‘in a large mansion, in a large park, with seventy head of deer. The woods are as fine as those at Lowther and the country more romantic; it has the character of the less grand parts of the neighbourhood of the Lakes.’
Thomas Poole vouched for their respectability and finances—both of which were in doubt, according to most people who met them—and they got the house for the very low rent of £23 a year.
The neighbours were indeed suspicious. A young man with his sister, so he said, looking after someone else’s child, so he said, wandering round the countryside at all hours of the night, looking at nature. Well, no wonder tongues wagged.
With Coleridge so near, and his constant stream of London and Bristol radicals and writers coming to see him, they tended to live a communal life. It was almost as if Pantisocracy had happened—but at home in England, not in America. The theory that one could get rid of one’s spouse if one wanted to, which had been one of the Pantisocrats’ original ideas, now came true as Coleridge more and more preferred the company of William and Dorothy to that of Sara his wife, leaving her for days and weeks on end, either while he stayed with the Wordsworths in their house or accompanied them on long walking tours round the West Country.
‘ He is a wonderful man,’ so Dorothy described Coleridge to Mary Hutchinson, just after the first meeting, saying what a sad loss it had been for Mary to miss meeting him. ‘His conversation teems with soul, mind and spirit. Then he is so benevolent, so good tempered and cheerful, and like William, interests himself so much about every trifle.’
On first sight, she hadn’t thought Coleridge all that handsome, which is a surprise, judging by a contemporary portrait which makes him look very much the romantic young poet, though his lips are noticeably heavy, as Dorothy was quick to spot:
I thought him very plain, that is, for about three minutes; he is pale and thin, has a wide mouth, thick lips and not very good teeth; longish, loose-growing half curling rough black hair. But if you hear him speak for five minutes, you think no more of them. His eye is large and full, not dark but grey. It speaks every emotion of his animated mind. It was more of the ‘poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling’ than I ever witnessed.
Coleridge was equally impressed by Dorothy:
If you expected to see a pretty woman, you would think her ordinary; if you expected to see an ordinary woman you would think her pretty, but her manners are simple, ardent, impressive. In every motion, her most innocent soul outbeams so brightly that who saw her would say, guilt was a thing impossible to her. Her eye watchful in minutest observation of nature and her taste a perfect electrometer. It bends, protrudes and draws in, at subtlest beauties and most recondite faults.
Dorothy had quickly shown Coleridge she had a mind of her own. He had let her see some of his journalism, expecting her instant admiration: ‘Some half a score or more of what I thought clever and epigrammatic and devilishly severe reviews … but a remark made by Miss Wordsworth to whom I had, in full expectation of gaining a laugh of applause, read one of my judgements, occasioned my committing the whole batch to the Fire.’
As for William, Coleridge’s opinion of him was pure hagiolatry. ‘Wordsworth is a very great man, the only man at all times and in all modes of excellence, I feel myself inferior.… The Giant Wordsworth. God love him! Even when I speak in terms of admiration due to his intellect, I fear lest those terms should keep out of sight the amiableness of manners.’
This worship of Wordsworth’s genius never faltered. For years, Coleridge did little else but rave about Wordsworth to all his friends, which they thought was very strange. And it was strange. Although they were alike in their radical views, in their undergraduate experiences and in their wandering impecunious life since university, they were in so many ways quite different people. Coleridge was very much a southerner, Devon-born but brought up in the middle of London. He had disliked his school-days, when he had retreated from being bullied and beaten into books and learning, arming himself with know-ledge gained from the Classics, though in later life still imagining in his dreams that masters had returned to thrash him. Coleridge was gregarious and impetuous, loved parties and social activites, was always with a crowd of friends, rushing from one thing to another. He had already dazzled everyone he met by the brilliance of his conversation and he was very much the golden boy, the centre of his own circle, attracting people, young and old, to seek out his company and his friendship. His contemporaries, such as Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt and Charles Lloyd, young and talented people themselves, made special journeys to be with him, to bask in his company, enjoy his mind. Cottle the bookseller and Poole the wealthy farmer and tanner were deeply impressed by him, far more than by Southey or Wordsworth. They gave him money, presents and free accommodation, and helped him in any way they could.
Wordsworth, on the other hand, had many typical northern qualities: he was solid, slow, unpolished, careful, dour, but with hidden depths. His totally happy schooldays, in the rural isolation of Hawkshead, where he lived much of his life in the open air, couldn’t have been more different from Coleridge’s. So far, his main fan had been Dorothy, and he’d had only one real patron: young Raisley Calvert, the dying youth. Yet when this awkward, ungainly northerner, with little sophistication of manner or appearance, arrived in Coleridge’s gilded life, Coleridge immediately subordinated his personality and his talents to Wordsworth’s. Coleridge’s friends couldn’t believe it. They were slightly jealous of Wordsworth’s arrival, resentful of the time and space and attention he was getting. When they tried to see where William’s genius lay, some of them found it very hard. Coleridge’s sudden passion for Wordsworth’s apparently simple rustic poems, made a few of them eager to tease William, to ridicule him when they got a chance. And they got their chances. Like Coleridge, they were the sort of smart, clever young men who were in the set which was asked to write those smart, sharp, clever reviews in the magazines. Wordsworth’s talents and inclinations never lay in that direction. He didn’t care for their cutting observations. They thought this was because he was too self-obsessed, which indeed he was—another reason to tease him, when given the opportunity.
Lamb had great fun, amongst his London friends, in describing William’s big heavy shoes, displaying them once, when he happened to have them in his possession, as provincial curiosities. Hazlitt, on his first meeting with William, when Coleridge introduced him and read out his poems, could at least sense a new style of poetry, but thought his appearance most strange:
He answered in some degree his friend’s description of him but was more gaunt and Don Quixote-like. He was quaintly dressed … in a brown fustian jacket and striped pantaloons.
There was something of a roll, a lounge in his gait.… There was a severe worn pressure of thought about his temples, a fire in his eye (as if he saw something in objects more than the outward appearance); an intense, high forehead, a Roman nose, cheeks furrowed by strong purpose and feeling, and a convulsive inclination to laughter about the mouth, a good deal at variance with the solemn, stately expression of the rest of the face.… He talked with a mixture of clear gushing accents, a deep guttural intonation, a strong tincture of the Northern burr.…
Although Coleridge praised everything about Wordsworth, going on about his genius in letters to his friends, such as William Godwin and the chemist Humphry Davy, Wordsworth hardly ever reciprocated in the same terms, taking all the praise as his due, though he did admire Coleridge’s mind and his learning and his conversation. In his quieter, more restrained way, he was just as devoted to his friend.
Intellectually, they disagreed on only one minor point. Whereas Coleridge was a Unitarian, Wordsworth professed no formal religious faith; Coleridge took this as being on God’s side, as Wordsworth wasn’t against religion: ‘I have now known him a year and some months and my admiration, I might say my awe, of his intellectual powers has increased even to this hour and, what is more important, he is a tried good man.’
That reference to him being tried is interesting. Coleridge was not known for his punctuality, his reliability or his sober habits, though Wordsworth, if he was then aware of such failings in Coleridge, dismissed them. They were all three in love with each other—or, as Coleridge remarked to several acquaintances, they were ‘three people, but one soul’. That rather leaves Mrs Coleridge out of account.
Wordsworth and Coleridge finished their respective dramas about the same time and sent them off to Covent Garden, though of course Coleridge was the only one who’d been offered a commission. However, he heard nothing from the theatre for six weeks, much to his fury, and eventually got a curt reply from Sheridan, rejecting it because of the ‘obscurity of the last three acts’. Wordsworth got better news. One of the principal actors at Covent Garden loved his play and asked William to do some alterations. Both William and Dorothy went up to London in great excitement. ‘If the play is accepted,’ wrote Dorothy to brother Christopher, keeping him abreast of family news, ‘we shall probably stay a fortnight or three weeks longer.’ Alas, it too was rejected and Wordsworth never tried to write another play.
While in London, they saw a good deal of Southey. Dorothy, who hadn’t met him before, wasn’t very impressed, though no doubt Coleridge had already given her some of his opinions. ‘I know a good deal of his character from our common friends. He is a young man of the most rigidly virtuous habits and is, I believe, exemplary in the discharge of all Domestic Duties, but though his talents are certainly very remarkable for his years, as far as I can judge, I think them much inferior to the talents of Coleridge.’
The failures of their respective plays left William and Coleridge free to concentrate on their poetry. William was working on ‘The Recluse’ and on the section on the ruined cottage in The Excursion. Coleridge was writing ‘The Ancient Mariner’ (a work he and William had originally planned to write together), ‘Christabel’, ‘Frost at Midnight’ and ‘Kubla Khan’. The idea for the last-named poem came to Coleridge in a dream. He’d gone away for a few days on his own, because of ill health, taken some grains of opium ‘to check a dysentery’, and in a dream (unfortunately interrupted by the arrival of a visitor) had a vision which he later wrote down as the unfinished poem ‘Kubla Khan’. It’s interesting to realize how often the use of visions—either natural ones like Wordsworth’s, or drug-induced ones, like Coleridge’s—influenced the writings of the Romantic poets. Research has been done to show the recurrence of certain images in their poetry, such as waves and flying, which occur in hallucinations. Wordsworth of course never took drugs and, after Cambridge, appears never to have indulged in strong drink, apart from the occasional glass of ale. His favourite drink was water. His favourite mental stimulus was nature. All the same, his visions, as on Salisbury Plain, could be just as awesome as those caused by drugs.
However, Coleridge at the time was in no sense dependent on drugs, taking them only on isolated occasions when he didn’t feel well. They were all living a healthy outdoor life, extremely active in every sense, not just in their walking tours in the surrounding countryside, but in their creative writing. It was for Coleridge a meteoric year—a never-to-be-equalled year of abundance, when poems and ideas flowed from his pen. Wordsworth had also been ignited, but he had always been a slower burner. He was by now almost twenty-eight—an old man by poetic standards, when you consider how many young poetic prodigies there have been. But though, in his careful northern way, he was slow to start, the meeting with Coleridge coincided with the beginning of a much longer spell of inspired creation than that enjoyed by his friend.
Amongst the radical friends who came to see the Wordsworths and Coleridge was John Thelwall, who had been tried in London on a charge of high treason, but acquitted. They talked noisily and heatedly long into the night with him, about revolution and the state of the war and the latest happenings in poor old France. What with their strange nocturnal habits, the north-country accents of the Wordsworths and Dorothy’s dark complexion, it is not surprising that some locals decided they were not just English Jacobins, but French spies. It is all rather laughable now, but it has to be remembered that England was at war, a known radical element was stirring up insurrection, and thoughts of invasion were in everyone’s mind.
In August 1797, a local doctor sent the following account of his suspicions to the Duke of Portland, the Home Secretary:
On the 8th instant I took the liberty to acquaint your grace with a very suspicious business concerning an emigrant family who have contrived to get possession of a mansion house at Alfoxden. I am since informed that the Master of the house has no wife with him but only a woman who passes for his Sister. The man has Camp Stools which he and his visitors take with them, when they go about the country upon their nocturnal or diurnal excursions which they have been heard to say were almost finished. They have been heard to say they should be rewarded for them, and were very attentive to the River near them.… These people may possibly be under-agents to some principal in Bristol.
The plot thickened, so much so that a Home Office secret agent, a Mr G. Walsh, was sent down to keep an eye on the suspected spies and write a full report on their activities. The official Home Office correspondence is proof that all this happened; the details have been invaluable to literary students in furnishing details of William’s, Dorothy’s and Coleridge’s life at the time and of the visitors who came to see them.
Walsh took up his quarters in the local inn at Stowey and began to spy on them, lying behind sand-dunes when they were on the seashore, listening to Wordsworth and Coleridge discussing someone called Spy Nozy—which convinced him he was on the right track, since he did not realize they were discussing Spinoza. Walsh took a statement from a man who’d waited at their table one evening when they had a large party of guests at Alfoxden. ‘There was a little stout man with dark cropt hair and wore a white hat and glasses [probably Thelwall] who after dinner got up and talked so loud and in such passion that I was frightened and did not like to go near them since.’ Such a large dinner did take place, though it doesn’t sound their normal style to have someone waiting, but Thomas Poole was there and perhaps paid for the dinner.
Walsh sounds rather like a down-trodden John le Carré secret agent, sent from London to trail round after some rural eccentrics for no apparent reason. In the end, he realized they weren’t either French or ‘immigrants’, though they might be harmful, all the same: ‘I think this will turn out no French affair but a mischiefous gang of disaffected Englishmen.’
Although the scare blew over, it was probably one of the reasons why the Wordsworths’ lease on Alfoxden was not renewed at the end of the year. They had certainly worried and distressed the local people and the owners didn’t want them back. The Wordsworths had nowhere else to go, as they couldn’t afford another cottage, unless it was very cheap. Basil Montagu had not been paying the money he owed them and not all the funds from the Calvert legacy had yet materialized. The only thing that tied them to the West Country was Coleridge’s presence. ‘What may be our destination I cannot say. We have no particular reason to be attached to the neighbourhood of Stowey,’ William wrote, ‘but the society of Coleridge.’
Coleridge had also been having problems over money, since his own magazine had failed. However, Tom and Josiah Wedgwood, of the pottery family, offered him an annuity of £150 a year. All three poets, Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge, had now been presented with handsome annuities by friends—people of their own age who, though not especially interested in literature, had been persuaded by the poets’ talents and worthiness to give them enough money to save them from the ordinary mundane problems of earning a living. There were no public patrons in those days: no Arts Councils or writers’ fellowships. The only way for a young man of no means to get a helping hand was to find a patron. All three of our poets achieved this without having published anything of public note—certainly without having made names for themselves. It says a lot for their personal magnetism.
Coleridge’s annuity, the Wedgwoods said, would release him from the need to become a Unitarian preacher, which had been his latest plan, as a way of providing an income to support himself, his wife and now their two children. But hardly had he received the money when he devised another plan. ‘We have come to a resolution, Coleridge, Mrs Coleridge, my Sister, and myself of going to Germany,’ William wrote to an old friend, James Losh, inviting him and also his wife to join the party. ‘We propose to pass the two ensuing years in order to acquire the German language and to furnish ourselves with a tolerable stock of information in natural science. May I venture a wish that she [Mrs Losh] would consent to join this little colony?’
To earn enough money for their trip to Germany, Wordsworth and Coleridge got down to compiling a book of poems which they then sold to Cottle. It was Cottle’s offer of thirty guineas for the book which was their specific reason for producing it, and for making them hurry to complete enough poems in time. The volume was Lyrical Ballads, the single most influential book of poetry in the history of English literature. By the time it came out, in September 1798, they were already in Germany.
These verses are from ‘Expostulation and Reply’ and ‘The Tables Turned’ which were written in June 1798 and appeared in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. It was based on a conversation Wordsworth had with Hazlitt when he was visiting Coleridge in the West Country, though Wordsworth transposed the setting to the Lake District. They ‘got into a metaphysical argument’ with Hazlitt extolling the virtues of books while Wordsworth replied, ‘Let Nature be your teacher.’
WHY, William, on that old grey stone,
Thus for the length of half a day,
Why, William, sit you thus alone,
And dream your time away?
One morning thus, by Esthwaite lake,
When life was sweet, I knew not why,
To me my good friend Matthew spake,
And thus I made reply:
‘The eye—it cannot choose but see;
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where’er they be,
Against or with our will.
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.’