The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge

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.