The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge

… I became a dreamer – and acquired an indisposition to all bodily activity – and I was fretful, and inordinately passionate, and as I could not play at any thing, and was slothful, I was despised & hated by the boys; and because I could read & spell, & had, I may truly say, a memory & understanding forced into almost an unnatural ripeness, I was flattered & wondered at by all the old women – & so I became very vain, and despised most of the boys, that were at all near my own age – and before I was eight years old, I was a character … 14

His father, the Reverend John Coleridge, was both vicar of the Devon town where the family lived, Ottery St Mary, and headmaster of the local school. He was a gentle and learned man, absent-minded and unworldly, with several obscure publications to his name. Coleridge remembered that his father ‘used to take me on his knee, and hold long conversations with me’.15 But John Coleridge was already fifty-three when his youngest child was born, and he died suddenly a few weeks before Sam’s ninth birthday. The family was now in difficult circumstances. Soon afterwards Coleridge was sent away to a charitable boarding school, Christ’s Hospital in London, from which it seems that he rarely returned home to Ottery. This felt to him like a rejection, and afterwards he never showed any affection towards his mother. ‘Boy! the School is your father! The School is your mother!’ bellowed his headmaster William Bowyer as he flogged the tearful child.

Coleridge’s brilliance earned him the status and privileges of a ‘Grecian’, a pupil destined for Oxford or Cambridge who wore a special uniform to distinguish him from the ordinary ‘blue-coat boys’. He won his place at Jesus in a blaze of honours. It was assumed that he was headed for the Church. A glorious career was in prospect; he might become a bishop, or perhaps headmaster of one of the great public schools.*

He read voraciously; years later he told his first biographer, James Gillman, that at fourteen, ‘My whole being was, with eyes closed to every object of present sense, to crumple myself up in a sunny corner and read, read, read.’ When an older schoolboy gave him a volume of William Lisle Bowles’s evocative and melancholy sonnets, Coleridge was so entranced that he painstakingly wrote out forty copies for distribution to friends. Bowles’s verse became a model for his own work, and Bowles himself a master whom the young Coleridge revered. When he later happened to see Bowles crossing the marketplace in Salisbury, Coleridge was too shy to speak to him.

Every schoolboy of this era was expected to write verse, both for its own sake and as an exercise in the study of Latin and Greek, translating classical originals into English. Coleridge’s early poetry was conventional stuff. It followed the classical models predominant in eighteenth-century verse, written in a convoluted ‘poetic’ diction that would soon come to be seen as artificial, characterised by elaborate abstractions far removed from everyday experience. The effect was strained, even turgid. Tired metaphors and phrases clogged up the lines. There was an excess of ornamentation, with too many double epithets. Bowyer tried to counter this tendency, to instil a bias towards the plainest form of words. He had a list of forbidden introductions, similes and expressions. ‘Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, Muse? Your Nurse’s daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? Oh, aye the cloister-pump, I suppose!’

One of Coleridge’s earliest poems was his ‘Monody on the Death of Chatterton’. Like Coleridge, Thomas Chatterton had been a blue-coat boy, the orphaned son of a Bristol schoolmaster, a precocious poet who at the age of sixteen claimed to have discovered a chestful of poems, letters and other documents written by a fifteenth-century monk, Thomas Rowley. Though these aroused interest and indeed excitement, Chatterton failed to prosper by them, and at the age of only eighteen, alone in a London garret, he committed suicide, driven by poverty to despair. The tragic story of neglected genius cut off at such an early age caught the imagination of young men everywhere, and Coleridge was one of many who identified powerfully with him, ominously heading his poem ‘A Monody on Chatterton, who poisoned himself at the age of eighteen – written by the author at the age of sixteen’.

In his last year at school Coleridge was confined for long months to the Christ’s Hospital sanatorium, lying in bed while hearing the boys outside laugh and play. He had become seriously ill after swimming fully clothed in the nearby New River, and afterwards wearing his wet clothes as they slowly dried on his back. Unsurprisingly he developed a fever, complicated by jaundice, no doubt as a result of the foul water in which he had immersed himself. His friend and first biographer James Gillman believed that all his future bodily sufferings could be dated from this episode.* Coleridge was a young man of enormous energy and robust vitality, yet he succumbed to recurrent attacks of illness. There was also a lasting psychological effect of this long period of convalescence. In the school sanatorium his nurse’s daughter, Jenny Edwards, helped to care for him, and he developed sentimental feelings for her; as he recovered he wrote a sonnet in her honour – which adds piquancy to Bowyer’s reported jibe about his ‘Muse’:

Fair as the bosom of the Swan

That rises graceful o’er the wave,

I’ve seen thy breast with pity heave,

And therefore love I thee, sweet Genevieve!

Forever after, Coleridge would derive a perverse erotic satisfaction from being helpless in the care of a desirable woman.

While ill he was regularly dosed with laudanum,* then prescribed as a panacea. Not only did opium relieve pain; it prompted delicious dreams that soothed the mind of the fevered boy. In future he was to resort to its use whenever he felt ill, or under pressure.

During his last year at Christ’s Hospital, Coleridge received news that his ‘sweet sister’ had died of consumption. By this time four of his brothers were already dead. Four remained, three of them much older than him. Frank (the nearest in age) had already gone away to sea, and subsequently joined the army in India. A year later he too would be dead, after receiving a wound during the siege of Seringapatam. This left the young Coleridge isolated, with no siblings near to him in age – but he found a surrogate family in the widowed mother and three sisters of a schoolmate, Tom Evans. They lived in Villiers Street, not far from the school, and Coleridge spent his Saturdays there. The Evans women provided substitute sisters and a substitute mother, whom he hoped would love him and be amused by his antics. By the time he left for Cambridge he believed himself in love with the eldest girl, Mary, though he was too shy to declare himself. Instead he wrote them all (including the mother) jokey, flirtatious letters. After his first university term he returned to them for Christmas in a poor state of health, and Mrs Evans nursed him tenderly. ‘Believe me, that You and my Sisters have the very first row in the front box of my Heart’s little theatre,’ he wrote to her afterwards, ‘and – God knows! you are not crowded.’17

In his first year at Cambridge Coleridge distinguished himself by winning a prize for a Greek ode on the then topical subject of the slave trade.* At the end of 1792 he narrowly failed to win a university scholarship, reaching the shortlist of four. Perhaps it was not surprising that he failed, given that for the six weeks preceding the examination – so he later said – he was almost constantly intoxicated. By this time he had acquired a reputation within Cambridge for his excellent classical scholarship, poetical language, and ‘a peculiar style of conversation’ – perhaps a euphemism, since Coleridge was always more inclined to talk than to listen.18 ‘He was very studious,’ recalled Valentine Le Grice, ‘but his reading was desultory and capricious.’19 Coleridge himself claimed to have been ‘a proverb to the University for Idleness’.20

He was also hopeless with money. Perhaps this judgement is harsh, because he never had a lot to spend, and was disappointed by his failure to win a scholarship. An annual income of almost £100 from a Christ’s Hospital exhibition and two university awards, together with the odd handout from his brothers, should have been enough to keep him, however. But he seemed incapable of living within his means. On his arrival at Cambridge he rashly gave an upholsterer carte blanche to redecorate his rooms, and was then ‘stupefied’ by the size of the bill. Soon he was drinking heavily, and he seems to have resumed taking opium, ‘building magnificent edifices of happiness on some fleeting shadow of reality’ in ‘soul-enervating reveries’. He often stole away to London, where there were plenty of temptations to empty his purse. Early in 1793 he wrote to his brother George summarising the state of his finances. He outlined his plans for a book of translations of ‘the best Lyric poems from the Greek, and the modern Latin writers’ – the first of many unrealised schemes. By raising two hundred subscriptions to this work, he felt that he would be able to pay off his debts, ‘which have corroded my Spirits greatly for some time Past’. He reckoned them at £58. Though George sent him some money, he was soon behind again. By the end of his second year at Cambridge he had somehow managed to run up further debts, which he now calculated, with misleading precision, at £148.17s.1¼d. He returned to Devon and presented himself before his older brothers with some trepidation. ‘I am fearful, that your Silence proceeds from Displeasure – If so, what is left for me to do – but to grieve? The Past is not in my Power – for the follies, of which I may have been guilty, I have been greatly disquieted – and I trust, the Memory of them will operate to future consistency of Conduct.’21

Coleridge’s brothers provided him with a sum to stave off his creditors, but he quickly frittered away much of this, loitering ten days in Tiverton to conduct a flirtation with Miss Fanny Nesbitt, ‘a very pretty girl’ he met on the coach. Rather than returning directly to Cambridge, he lingered in London in order to be near Mary Evans. While walking between a tavern and a shop where he went to purchase a lottery ticket, he composed a poem, ‘To Fortune’, which was published in the Morning Chronicle. On his arrival back in college he discovered further embarrassments, ‘which in my wild carelessness I had forgotten, and many of which I had contracted almost without knowing it’. Desperate, he fled back to London at eleven o’clock at night, where for three days he lived in a ‘tempest of pleasure’. He returned to Cambridge and stayed a week, then left again for London, by now in a state of delirium. ‘When Vice has not annihilated Sensibility, there is little need of a Hell!’22 There he seems to have contemplated suicide – but after a night in ‘a house of ill-fame’, ruminating in a chair, and an agitated morning walk in the park, he sought refuge instead in the bosom of the army, enlisting in the 15th Light Dragoons under the name Silas Tomkyn Comberbache.

Little is known of Wordsworth’s life in the period after his return from France at the end of 1792. For us this is a dark time – no letters of his survive written between September 1792, when he was still in Blois, and February 1794. Almost all that can be deduced of his activities during these lost seventeen months derives from incidental remarks in Dorothy’s letters to her friend Jane Pollard, or from The Prelude. Until the twentieth century only a handful of close family members knew of his involvement with Annette Vallon. But soon after the First World War, two letters from Annette that had been intercepted by the French police almost 130 years earlier surfaced in the Loir-et-Cher archives. Both were dated 20 March 1793. One was addressed to Dorothy, the other to ‘Williams’. Emotion overflows from both; they lack punctuation; the spelling is idiosyncratic and inconsistent. They read like the letters of a naïve young girl, not a woman of nearly twenty-seven. The content is in each case repetitive and confused. She swings one way and then the other, longing for him, yet fearing that he may be taken prisoner if he returns. It would comfort her, she writes, if he could come and give her the ‘glorious’ title of his wife, even if ‘cruel necessity’ would compel him to leave immediately. ‘Come, my love, my husband, and receive the tender embraces of your wife, of your daughter,’ she urges, apparently expecting his imminent arrival. Their child, now three months old and baptised ‘Anne-Caroline Wordswodsth’, she tells him, ‘grows more and more like you every day’. Holding her baby close enough to feel her heart beat, Annette imagines how it will stir when she says, ‘Caroline, in a month, in a fortnight, in a week, you are going to see the most beloved of men, the most tender of men.’ She ends by sending him a thousand kisses, ‘sur la bouche, sur les yeux et mon petit* que j’aime toujours, que je recomande bien a tes soins’. Mention of other letters shows that she and Wordsworth were in regular correspondence, and her letter to Dorothy (enclosed with the one to William) makes it obvious that he has confided in his sister; Annette has already received at least one welcoming letter from her, perhaps more. She writes of the time, a little further off, when the three of them will live together in ‘notre petit ménage’. As for Caroline, ‘My dear sister, you will be her second mother.’23

It is not impossible that Wordsworth might have returned to France in 1793. Provision existed for non-combatants to travel between warring countries. The scientist Humphry Davy, for example, was invited to lecture in France at the height of the struggle between the two nations. Of course, there would have been difficulties, and this was a particularly hazardous time, the rule of law in France being so uncertain. Annette hoped that Wordsworth would return to legitimise their union, while acknowledging that it could be only a short visit; they would make a home together once the war was over. There was a widespread belief (which Annette shared) that it would not last long, now that the might of Great Britain had been added to that of the Continental Allies. France appeared to be in chaos, without an effective government while at war with almost all of Europe. After their initial successes, French armies were everywhere in retreat. The security of the young Republic was undermined by uprisings in several parts of the country in the spring of 1793, including a serious revolt in the Vendée.

These letters of Annette’s never reached Wordsworth or his sister, and there is no evidence to indicate whether Wordsworth did consider returning to France to marry her. According to Dorothy, he was then ‘looking out and wishing for the opportunity of engaging himself as Tutor to some young Gentleman’.24 Early in July he set off on a tour of the West Country in the company of William Calvert, a friend from their days as fellow pupils at Hawkshead School. Calvert had become a man of property on the death of his father, and he offered to pay all their travelling expenses; since Wordsworth had nothing else to do, he accepted. They passed a month of ‘calm and glassy days’ on the Isle of Wight. In the evenings Wordsworth walked along the seashore, the prospect of the Channel fleet at Spithead preparing for sea always before him; as the sun set he would hear the evening cannon. But this magnificent sight only deepened his sense of isolation, symbolising as it did the division in his heart. He was full of melancholy and foreboding. He did not share the general confidence that the war would swiftly be brought to a successful conclusion. He had witnessed the spirit prevailing in France, and foresaw a long struggle ahead, ‘productive of distress and misery beyond all possible calculation’.25

The French were dealing with the crisis in their own ruthless fashion. A decree was proclaimed condemning all rebels to summary execution; watch committees were set up in communes throughout the country; a Revolutionary tribunal was established to try traitors. In April a Committee of Public Safety with extraordinary powers came into being, which soon began to aggrandise all the powers of the executive. Later that summer a levée en masse would be declared, requiring all unmarried men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five to register for military service. The struggle for power between the Girondins and the Mountain reached its climax at the beginning of June: after the Convention was besieged by a huge and heavily armed mob, Brissot and the other Girondin leaders were expelled and placed under house arrest. One by one, the remaining uncommitted deputies fled Paris, leaving the Convention in the hands of the Mountain. The assassination of Marat on 13 July provided a pretext for further purges, consolidating the Jacobin hold on the machinery of government. A Law of Suspects ordered the immediate arrest of anybody against whom there was even a suspicion of political disloyalty. Emergency powers gave Revolutionary committees throughout France the power of life and death. The accused were tried and condemned in groups. Pity for the criminal was itself proof of treason. The pace of executions accelerated. The Terror had begun.

We can only speculate how much of this reached Wordsworth at the time, and how he reacted. Developments in France were reported in detail in the English newspapers; the war gave them added relevance. It is hard to imagine that he would not have followed the news from France closely. The eclipse of the Girondins must have affected him, especially as he was acquainted with some of those men now outlawed or imprisoned. On 13 July his Orléans landlord, M. Gellet-Duvivier, was guillotined; if Wordsworth heard about this, it would have seemed to him that the Terror was closing in. Annette’s family were (regrettably) royalists; would they be safe?* Already torn by a conflict of loyalties, Wordsworth had more and more reason to be anxious about the direction events were taking. He had given his heart to the Revolution; now perhaps he was beginning to experience the torment of doubt. Meanwhile change at home seemed further away than ever. The harsh sentences dealt to those convicted of sedition silenced reformers and radicals alike. Fear of prosecution deterred Wordsworth from expressing the emotion raging within him. It was understandable that he should seek to escape from his thoughts, to find relief

… by the sides

Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,

Wherever nature led; more like a man

Flying from something that he dreads, than one

Who sought the thing he loved …

Around the end of July Wordsworth and Calvert crossed from the Isle of Wight to the mainland, and continued in a whiskey (a form of open carriage) towards Salisbury, intending to go on in the same way towards Wales and then up along the border to Chester; but the horse drawing them ‘began to caper in a most dreadful manner’, and dragged them into a ditch, damaging the vehicle beyond repair. Though neither man was injured, a decision was taken not to continue together – most probably for practical reasons. Calvert may have given Wordsworth some money for his journey; he then mounted his horse and rode off into the north, leaving Wordsworth to proceed, as Dorothy put it, supported by his ‘firm friends, a pair of stout legs’. This unexpected parting turned out to be serendipitous, because the impressions Wordsworth received during the rest of the tour proved inspirational. On foot, and alone with his thoughts, he was more responsive to the landscape, and more open to encounters along the way.

His path took him along chalk tracks across the vast plateau of Salisbury Plain, the wind whistling through unending dreary fields of corn, crows eddying in the sky. It was a desolate place, with few trees or hedges to break the monotony; barely inhabited then, but pockmarked with prehistoric remains. As he walked, Wordsworth meditated on the savage past, and on the ‘calamities, principally consequent on war, to which, more than other classes of men, the poor are subject’. He imagined a vagrant ex-soldier, caught in the open as a storm began to sweep the Plain, seeking shelter from the driving rain and howling wind among the monoliths of Stonehenge. It is tempting to speculate that Wordsworth did the same, especially as contemporary records describe ‘a storm of extraordinary intensity [that] lashed southern England with hailstones as big as six inches round’.26 But perhaps the temptation should be resisted, because in a letter written many years afterwards, Wordsworth recalled how ‘overcome with heat and fatigue I took my siesta among the Pillars of Stonehenge’, and complained jokingly that he ‘was not visited by the Muse in my Slumbers’.27

If the muse left him alone on this occasion, she cannot have been far off, because another vision came to Wordsworth on the Plain, where relics of the distant past – standing stones, barrows, ancient tracks, stone circles, mounds and hill forts – are more evident than anywhere else in Britain. In The Prelude he tells us that

While through those vestiges of ancient times

I ranged, and by the solitude o’ercome,

I had a reverie and saw the past,

Saw multitudes of men, and here and there

A single Briton in his wolf-skin vest

With shield and stone-ax, stride across the wold;

The voice of spears was heard, the rattling spear

Shaken by arms of mighty bone, in strength

Long mouldered, of barbaric majesty.28

Wordsworth goes on to describe a nightmare of darkness descending (perhaps a lowering storm?), a sacrificial altar lit by dismal flames, and the groans of those waiting to die; followed by a more peaceful vision of bearded Druids pointing with white wands to the starry sky.

From Salisbury Plain Wordsworth made his way via Bath towards the Welsh border, crossing the Severn Estuary somewhere near Bristol and then ascending the Wye Valley. Today, the lower Wye is still lovely enough to stir the heart, especially when sunlight penetrates the woods that line the valley’s steep sides, glinting on the fast-flowing river below. Brooding cliffs tower against the sky. Ruined castles perch high above the gorge. Celebrated for its picturesque qualities,* this was one of the first places in Britain to attract tourists, and pleasure boats plied up and down the river. Its appeal was marred by importunate beggars who haunted the ruins of Tintern Abbey, and a number of ironworks belching smoke into the air, but neither seems to have bothered Wordsworth. Poetic inspirations came to him one after another: the lovely valley itself, Tintern Abbey, a girl he met at Goodrich Castle who became the heroine of ‘We are Seven’, a tinker he met at Builth who served as a model for ‘Peter Bell’. Above all, the river itself:

… Oh! How oft –

In darkness and amid the many shapes

Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir unprofitable and the fever of the world

Have hung upon the beatings of my heart –

How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,

O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer through the woods,

How often has my spirit turned to thee!

Wordsworth continued north, reaching his friend Robert Jones’s cottage in north Wales towards the end of August. Here he seems to have paused, in anticipation of an onward journey to Halifax to rendezvous with Dorothy, whom he had not seen for almost three years. ‘Oh my dear, dear sister,’ he had written to her earlier that summer, ‘with what transport shall I again meet you, with what rapture shall I again wear out the day in your sight. I assure you so eager is my desire to see you that all obstacles vanish. I see you in a moment running or rather flying to my arms.’29

William and Dorothy had spent most of their lives apart. After the death of their mother in 1778, Dorothy, then only six years old, had been separated from her siblings and sent to live with her mother’s cousin, Elizabeth Threlkeld, more than a hundred miles off in Halifax, while her four brothers – Richard, William, and her two younger brothers, John and Christopher – remained with their father in Cockermouth. She did not return for her father’s funeral in 1784, and was reunited with her brothers only in the summer of 1787, after a gap of nine years. ‘You know not how happy I am in their company,’ she wrote at the time to her bosom friend, Jane Pollard. ‘They are just the kind of boys I could wish them, they are so affectionate and kind to me as makes me love them more and more every day.’ William, then seventeen and nearly two years Dorothy’s senior, was due to go up to Cambridge in the autumn. ‘William and Christopher are very clever boys at least so they appear in the partial eyes of a Sister.’30