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Another prominent deputy, the Minister of the Interior Jean Marie Roland, announced the discovery amongst the King’s belongings of an iron chest filled with papers, apparently incriminating not just the King himself, but also some of the more moderate deputies. Those trying to defend the King were now on the defensive, fearful that they might in turn come under attack. A number chose to abandon Louis in order to protect themselves.
Early in December the Convention ended its discussion on the principle of trying the King and ordered an indictment to be prepared. On the eleventh Louis was brought before the Convention to answer the charge of fomenting counter-revolution. His replies, though dignified, were unconvincing.
Wordsworth had planned to be back in London during the month of October.
(#) He had two poems ready for publication, and a woman in an advanced state of pregnancy who needed his support. But he lingered a month or more in Paris, no doubt fascinated to be on hand while the future of the world was being decided. It seems that he may have attended some of the debates in the Convention as a spectator. Two years earlier he had been unwilling to make a small detour to come to Paris; now he was unable to drag himself away. At last, he returned reluctantly to England,
Compelled by nothing less than absolute want
Of funds for my support.
(#)
* (#) This is a low estimate. They travelled about two thousand miles in all, but some of the journey was by boat.
* (#) The term came into usage around 1800.
† (#) Coach travel cost 2d or 3d per mile, a prohibitive expense for all but the wealthy.
* (#) It seems likely to have been on this trip that Wordsworth visited the celebrated travel writer Thomas Pennant, whose Tour in Scotland had stimulated Johnson and Boswell to make their journey to the Western Isles.
* (#) Generally known as such after the place where members of the club met in the rue St Jacques. Their official name was the Society of the Friends of the Revolution.
* (#) Until the Revolution, commissions in the army had been reserved for scions of families whose aristocratic lineage went back at least four generations.
* (#) Confusion is caused by the term ‘aristocrat’. The French noblesse was not the same as the English aristocracy: even allowing for the difference in population size, they were far more numerous – perhaps a quarter of a million people, compared to the 10,000 or so in Britain. By no means all ‘aristocrats’ were wealthy, despite occupying a privileged position under the ancien régime. It was not unknown for a French ‘aristocrat’ to push his own plough. In Britain, the term ‘aristocrat’ had a political as well as a social meaning; it was used as shorthand to denote anyone opposed to reform; while a ‘democrat’ was defined as one who demanded radical changes to the constitution, together with an immediate peace with France and recognition of the French Republic.
† (#) His MPs were known as ‘Lonsdale’s ninepins’
* (#) Lonsdale was Sir James Lowther until ennobled in 1784.
* (#) Commissioned by the Jacobin Club but never completed (in part because of the need for constant changes; some of those who had been present became personae non gratae, and thus had to be excluded, while others, who had not, now wished to be included): existing only in the form of David’s preliminary (but detailed) sketches, some of which portray the assembled oath-swearers as classically severe nudes.
* (#) It may be significant that Louvet had been elected to the Convention to represent the Loiret, the département in which Wordsworth had been living; perhaps this fact contributed to Wordsworths interest in him
* (#) Joseph Priestley was made a citizen of France in September. He too was elected to the Convention, but declined the election.
2 REACTION (#)
Wordsworth arrived in England in December 1792 overflowing with love for humanity, only to find the majority of his fellow countrymen suspicious or even belligerent. Recent events in France had thoroughly alarmed conservative opinion in Britain. It was one thing to limit the powers of the monarchy: quite another to abolish the monarchy altogether. With each passing week came news of further excesses; émigrés arrived by the boatload on British shores, every one bringing stories of fresh outrages. In its anxiety to avoid war, Pitt’s government had striven to remain neutral towards Revolutionary France, while stifling radical agitation at home. On 21 May 1792 a Royal Proclamation had been issued, encouraging magistrates to be more vigorous in controlling riotous meetings and seditious writings. Not much had ensued at the time, beyond a decision (perhaps taken beforehand) to prosecute Paine.
Meanwhile the victorious French armies had continued their advance, carrying all before them. The Prussians were driven back across the Rhine, and in November the French occupied Belgium, while in the south Savoy was annexed. On 19 November the Convention promised ‘fraternity and assistance’ to ‘all those wishing to recover their liberty’. The war changed its character: it was no longer a defence of the Republic, but a war of liberation. In the Convention Brissot declared, ‘We cannot relax until all Europe is in flames.’
The Convention’s threat to export the Revolution prompted Pitt to act, beginning a succession of prosecutions of radical authors, printers and publishers. At the same time the government released a flood of crude anti-French, pro-monarchist propaganda. Stories spread of plots, of insurrection, of traitors in our midst. Spies, informers and agents provocateurs proliferated. Support for the Revolution was portrayed as unpatriotic. It was not difficult to stir up popular sentiment against France, nor against those who appeared to side with the Old Enemy. Dissenters were especially vulnerable. By this time religious dissent and political radicalism had become synonymous; it was easy to portray prominent dissenters as pro-French Revolutionary conspirators. There had already been an ominous indication of what could happen if the crude prejudices of the people were inflamed. Back in 1791, a dinner in Birmingham to celebrate the second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille had provoked three days of rioting. Though the mob chanted ‘No Popery’ (as well as the inevitable ‘Church and King’), its victims were mainly prosperous dissenters with progressive views, most prominently Joseph Priestley, whose house (including his precious library) and laboratory were burned to the ground.
Britons were encouraged to draw up loyal addresses to George III. Those who declined to add their signatures were deemed to be suspect. Loyalists powdered their hair in the traditional style, while radicals let it hang loose in the ‘French’ fashion. Inns displayed gilt signs: ‘No JACOBINS ADMITTED HERE’. In November the MP John Reeves founded an anti-Jacobin association, and branches sprang up around the country, a counter-revolutionary equivalent to the Jacobin clubs. A month later Reeves founded an Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, which met fortnightly at the Crown and Anchor tavern in The Strand. Burke proposed the toast: ‘Old England against new France’.
A further Royal Proclamation on 1 December 1792 summoned the militia to suppress ‘seditious activities’. Parliament was recalled to combat the threat of insurrection. In the House of Commons, Fox attempted to calm exaggerated fears:
An insurrection! Where is it? Where has it reared its head! Good God! An insurrection in Great Britain! No wonder the militia were called out, and parliament assembled in the extraordinary way in which they have been. But where is it?
(#)
But his ironic words were scarcely heard in the storm of panic sweeping across the country. Fox’s allies began to desert him, going over to the ministry one by one, until eventually he would be left with only a rump of loyal supporters, too small to be able to make any serious challenge in Parliament.
The case against Paine had come to court in June, only to be adjourned. It was widely rumoured that the Attorney-General was reluctant to proceed to trial because he did not approve of the prosecution (a charge he denied). But the government’s own propaganda created pressure to make an example of Paine. He was dogged by government hirelings who hissed and hooted at him on every public occasion. Pillars of the community demonstrated their loyalty by burning his book in public.
Paine was among well-wishers at Joseph Johnson’s house in St Paul’s Churchyard one evening when another radical, the poet William Blake, warned him not to go home; a warrant had been issued for his arrest. Paine left that night for Dover. Within days he had taken up his seat in the Convention. On 18 December he was tried in absentia, and after being found guilty by a packed jury, was declared an outlaw.* (#) Demonstrations against him were promoted around the country. His effigy was burned, shot at, hanged, and pounded to smithereens with a sledgehammer. According to the undergraduate Samuel Taylor Coleridge, then making a rare visit to his home town of Ottery St Mary, the locals were very disappointed that Paine had not been ‘cut to pieces at Canterbury’.
Such was the atmosphere when Wordsworth returned to England: a dismaying contrast with the mood in France – and about to become much worse. On 21 January 1793 the former King of France went to the guillotine. The news horrified the British public. (In the Convention, Paine had tried to argue against the execution, only to be shouted down by Marat.) Radicals were already divided in their responses to the developing situation in France, and on the defensive against the new programme of government repression. Now public opinion hardened against them. Just as the radical cause in Britain had been boosted by the outbreak of the Revolution, so it was undermined by the killing of the King.
John Frost, secretary of the Corresponding Society, was among the country’s most prominent radicals. He had been one of the pair of delegates sent to Paris by the Society for Constitutional Information to assure the French Convention that the British people would never support a war against liberty. In this capacity he had been present at Louis XVI’s trial, and as a result he had been denounced by Burke as ‘the ambassador to the murderers’. Early in 1793 Frost was arrested on a charge of sedition, on the basis of an alleged conversation in Percy’s coffee house, Marylebone; he was supposed to have declared that he wanted ‘no king in England’, and that ‘the constitution of this country is a bad one’. (It seems that he was drunk at the time.) On these flimsy grounds Frost was struck off the attorney’s roll, imprisoned for six months, required to provide £500 as a surety of good behaviour for five years or face prolonged imprisonment until he did so, and made to stand in the pillory for an hour. (The latter was no small punishment; men had been mutilated or even killed as a result of blows received in the pillory.) Frost’s was one of a number of prosecutions for sedition promoted by the government in the spring of 1793 in an attempt to intimidate radicals.
On 29 January Wordsworth’s poems ‘An Evening Walk’ and ‘Descriptive Sketches’ were published by Joseph Johnson in two quarto volumes. If not quite his first appearance in print – a poem of his had been published in the European Magazine – these were, at the very least, an attempt to prove himself: ‘as I had done nothing by which to distinguish myself at the university, I thought these little things might shew that I could do something’.
(#) But his hopes fell flat. Reviews were cool and sales were slow. Given the timing, that was hardly surprising. Three days after the poems were published, France declared war on Britain. ‘Descriptive Sketches’, which concluded in a hymn of praise to the new Republic, could scarcely have appeared at a less propitious moment.
The coming of war increased Wordsworth’s sense of alienation. He loved his country deeply; and hated what his country was doing. For him, Revolutionary France was the hope of Mankind; now his own kin made war on her, in unholy alliance with the despotic emperors of central Europe. Even now these tyrants were carving up Poland between them, crudely annexing the territory of a free people. Wordsworth secretly rejoiced at news of British defeats, and in church sat silent among the congregation, ‘like an uninvited guest’, while prayers were offered up for British victories.
Oh, much have they to account for, who could tear
By violence at one decisive rent
From the best youth in England their dear pride,
Their joy, in England …
(#)
In France, Wordsworth had come to feel himself a patriot; in England he was made to feel a traitor. Moreover, war with France divided him from his mistress and his daughter, born in December and baptised in the cathedral at Orléans. It was, as he recognised, a profound shock to his moral nature:
… I felt
The ravage of this most unnatural strife
In my own heart; there lay it like a weight
At enmity with all the tenderest springs
Of my enjoyments. I, who with the breeze
Had played, a green leaf on the blessed tree
Of my beloved country – nor had wished
For happier fortune than to wither there –
Now from my pleasant station was cut off,
And tossed about in whirlwinds …
(#)
Since his return from France Wordsworth had been lodging with his elder brother Richard, a lawyer in Staple Inn.* (#) According to De Quincey, his companions were forced to play cards with him every night, ‘as the best mode of beguiling his sense of distress’. Disaffected and resentful, he was indignant to read the strictures on the French Revolution by Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff. The Bishop’s remarks were written in response to the execution of Louis XVI, and rushed into print a few days afterwards as an appendix to a sermon delivered eight years earlier. The very title of the original sermon was provocative: ‘The Wisdom and Goodness of God in having made both Rich and Poor’. It was hard to take such stuff from anyone, least of all from a man renowned for his venality. But it was the new appendix that especially infuriated Wordsworth. Watson commended the British government’s measures against radicals, ‘the flagitious dregs of a nation’. When the Revolution began, Watson had given his ‘hearty approbation’ to the French attempts to free themselves from arbitrary power, just as he had sided with the American colonists – but recent developments in France had caused him to ‘fly with terror and abhorrence from the altar of liberty’. Pitt’s administration was right not to tolerate the ‘wild fancies and turbulent tempers of discontented or ill-informed individuals’. The British constitution might not be perfect, but it already provided as much liberty and equality as was desirable, and was far too excellent to be amended by ‘peasants and mechanics’. British courts were impartial and incorrupt; parliamentary reform was unnecessary; provision for the poor in Britain was so liberal as to discourage industry. ‘Look round the globe,’ urged Watson complacently, ‘and see if you can discover a single nation on all its surface so powerful, so rich, so beneficial, so free and happy as our own.’
Such opinions were not uncommon. The Scottish Lord Justice Clerk, Lord Braxfield, for example, held that the British constitution was perfect; and therefore that anyone proposing any change was prima facie guilty of sedition. But Watson’s words particularly irritated Wordsworth. Maybe it was because he read them at an especially vulnerable moment. And maybe it was the author himself, as much as what he wrote, that irritated him. Wordsworth and Watson had much in common. Like Wordsworth, Watson came from the Lakes, and indeed lived there still, on the banks of Windermere (far from Llandaff). Like Wordsworth, Watson was a Cambridge man. Until now he had been known as a levelling prelate, the Bishop of dissenters – which rendered his defection more grievous. He had risen from modest origins, a fact that made his condescending attitude to the poor even more unforgivable.
Wordsworth wrote a furious retort, which he entitled ‘A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff, on the Extraordinary Avowal of his Political Principles’. He defended the killings in France, including the execution of the King, as ‘a convulsion from which is to spring a fairer order of things’. Contrasting the Bishop of Llandaff with the Bishop of Blois, he quoted Grégoire’s words at the opening of the Convention, and repeatedly stressed the unanimity of twenty-five million Frenchmen as in itself legitimising acts carried out in their name. Declaring himself to be ‘an advocate of republicanism’, he argued the necessity of abolishing not just the monarchy, but the aristocracy too. This system of ‘fictitious superiority’ produced idleness, corruption, hypocrisy, sycophancy, pride and luxury. Poverty bred misery, promiscuity and prostitution. Britons were like slaves:
We are taught from infancy that we were born in a state of inferiority to our oppressors, that they were sent into the world to scourge and we to be scourged. Accordingly we see the bulk of mankind actuated by these fatal prejudices, even more ready to lay themselves under the feet of the great, than the great are to trample upon them.
Wordsworth’s use of the first person plural identified him with the oppressed, the ‘swinish multitude’ of Burke’s notorious sneer. ‘Redress is in our power’ – but the popular mind had been ‘debauched’.
Left to the quiet exercise of their own judgment do you think the people would have thought it necessary to set fire to the house of the philosophic Priestley, and to hunt down his life like that of a traitor or a parricide; – that, deprived almost of the necessaries of existence by the burden of their taxes, they would cry out as with one voice for a war from which not a single ray of consolation can visit them to compensate for the additional keenness with which they are about to smart under the scourge of labour, of cold, and of hunger?
Wordsworth deplored the ‘infatuation with war, ‘which is now giving up to the sword so large a portion of the poor and consigning the rest to the more slow and painful consumption of want’. Drawing on his own experience of the Lonsdale lawsuit, he condemned ‘the thorny labyrinth of litigation’, ‘the consuming expense of our never-ending process, the verbosity of unintelligible statutes, and the perpetual contrariety in our judicial decisions’. In a bitterly sarcastic finale he thanked the Bishop for his ‘desertion’ from the friends of liberty, ‘conscious that an enemy lurking in our ranks is ten times more formidable than when drawn out against us’.
(#)* (#)
Wordsworth’s arguments were made with passionate fervour. In them one can trace the influence of the seventeenth-century Puritans, republican writers like Sidney, Marvell and Harrington, as well as that of Paine and the French orators whose debates he had heard so recently.
(#) But primarily this was a very personal piece of writing, the fierce heat of the author’s emotions blazing on the page. It is beyond question that Wordsworth wanted to blast Watson. Yet his diatribe was not published. Why not?
It is suggestive that the surviving manuscript of the ‘Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff’ is not in Wordsworth’s hand. Perhaps he had a fair copy made as a first step towards publication, and then something prevented him from proceeding? It may have been difficult to find a publisher willing to risk publishing such an intemperate pamphlet in such a combustible climate. There was also a considerable risk to Wordsworth himself, even if he published it anonymously. To sign yourself ‘a Republican’ at such a moment, as Wordsworth had done, was provocative; it implied approval of Louis’s execution. ‘The very term is become one of the most opprobrious in the English Language,’ Priestley was quoted as saying in February 1793. The author of such a pamphlet would be notorious if identified; he might well face prosecution, like Frost; he could certainly abandon any hopes he might still cherish of preferment in the Church, or in any other profession. Some years later Gilbert Wakefield would be sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for writing what was deemed to be a seditious pamphlet,* (#) in response to another effusion of Watson’s. Wordsworth’s elder brother may have urged him to suppress the work. Perhaps prudence triumphed over passion.
Whatever happened, the letter to the Bishop did not appear in print. Wordsworth remained angry and frustrated.
If Wordsworth had been in any doubt about the risks of publishing his ‘Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff’ at such a time, he needed to look no further than his old university, where proceedings were beginning against William Frend, a Fellow of Jesus College, for publishing what was in most ways a much more innocuous pamphlet. Its title, Peace and Union,† (#) does not sound particularly provocative. But early in 1793 ‘peace’ was a dirty word.
Cambridge attitudes to the Revolution reflected those of the country as a whole. The university had welcomed its early manifestations; there had been a proposal to hold an annual dinner to mark the fall of the Bastille. The young men were encouraged to write on the subject. In September 1790 one of them delivered a prize-winning speech in Trinity College chapel in memory of William III, hero of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, making an explicit comparison with recent events in France: ‘Liberty has begun her progress, and hope tells us, that she has only begun.’
(#)
Subsequent developments across the Channel had divided opinion in Cambridge, as they had divided opinion everywhere. Many of the older men recoiled from the violent disturbances that ensued as the French authorities lost control of events. In the summer of 1792 they signalled their feelings by sending a loyal address to King George. But not all of them concurred. Radicals and reformists sympathetic to the revolutionaries constituted an intellectually active minority within the university, centred on Frend’s college, Jesus. Many of these were more or less openly nonconformist (particularly Unitarian). Though in theory it was impossible to take a degree or to obtain a college Fellowship without subscribing to the Thirty-Nine Articles (the measure of conformity to the Church of England), in practice there was a degree of toleration. Nonconformists were not permitted to teach, but they were usually allowed to retain their Fellowships and to reside in college.
Among the undergraduates, the developing Revolution stimulated impassioned debate. Younger men were much more open to change, much less wary of turmoil. Some zealots relished Revolutionary violence as a necessary purge; others justified it in the service of a greater good. Revolutionary rhetoric made a compelling appeal to the young; the high ideals of the revolutionaries contrasted strongly with the cynical corruption omnipresent in British society. The Revolution stressed abstract virtues: liberty, fraternity and equality. Its reactionary opponents seemed negative in their reliance on tradition, caution and stability. The revolutionaries believed in the nobility of man – though not of course in that of certain criminal individuals – and what young person does not believe in the nobility of man? The Revolution was the future, or so it seemed. To the intellectually curious, this experiment in humanity could not but be fascinating.
Moreover, it was hard not to feel moved by the events in France. Who could fail to be stirred by the heroic defence of the Republic against seemingly insuperable odds? Professional armies of mercenaries had been beaten back by untrained boys. In Paris, barely-armed citizens, men and women alike, had prevailed time and again against the organised musketry of soldiers. The Convention itself was a theatre, its theme the fate of mankind, its principals men like Marat and Robespierre, distinguished not by the pedigree of their bloodlines but by their strength of character, their courage, their conviction, their purity.
As tension increased between Britain and France, so divisions at home became deeper and the debate more heated. In Cambridge, as in the rest of the country, positions were hardening. There were riots in the city that winter: a dissenters’ meeting house and several shops were attacked. Tom Paine was burned in effigy on the last day of 1792. A hundred and twelve local publicans solemnly pledged to report to the magistrates treasonable or seditious conversations, books, or pamphlets. Nonetheless, ‘pamphlets swarmed from the press’. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was then in his second year at Jesus, and according to his fellow undergraduate and former schoolmate Charles Valentine Le Grice, his room was ‘the constant rendezvous of conversation-loving friends’. There was no need for the other undergraduates to read the latest pamphlets, because Coleridge had read them all on the morning they appeared; ‘and in the evening, with our negus,* (#) we had them viva voce gloriously’.
(#)
One such pamphlet was Fox’s Letter to the Westminster Electors, which followed the line he had taken in Parliament in attempting to soothe the ‘false alarm’ raging in the country. Fox believed the government to be deliberately stirring up animosity towards reformists and dissenters, using rumour and hearsay in support of its repressive policies. Evidently Coleridge was sympathetic to Fox’s views. ‘Have you read Mr Fox’s letter to the Westminster Electors?’ he wrote to his sweetheart, Mary Evans. ‘It is quite the political Go at Cambridge, and has converted many souls to the Foxite faith.’ He signed his letter ‘with the ardour of fraternal friendship’.
(#)
William Frend’s Peace and Union appeared a few days later. Frend lamented the fact that Britain was on the brink of war, a war against the friends of mankind. He aimed to reconcile the ‘contending parties’, the advocates of a republic and the defenders of the constitution. Britain was split into two camps, he wrote: ‘the minds of men are at present greatly agitated; and the utmost rigour of government, aided by the exertions of every lover of his country, is necessary to preserve us, from falling into all the horrors attendant on civil commotions’. As a prominent dissenter, Frend had good reason to fear public disorder. He had already suffered at the hands of the mob, when the manuscript of a book on which he had been collaborating with Joseph Priestley was burned during the 1791 Birmingham riots. He was horrified by the ‘assassinations, murders, massacres, burning of houses, plundering of property, [and] open violations of justice’ which had marked the progress of the French Revolution. For him, the moral to be drawn from these events was clear: that abuses and grievances should be corrected as soon as they were known. ‘Had the French monarch seasonably given up some useless prerogatives, he might still have worn the crown; had the nobility consented to relinquish those noble privileges, which were designed only for barbarous ages, they might have retained their titles; could the clergy have submitted to be citizens, they might still have been in possession of wealth and influence.’ To prevent similar upheaval here in Britain, argued Frend, parliamentary reform was essential.
(#)
Though this might seem reasonable enough, the university authorities decided otherwise. The Master and Fellows of Jesus College passed resolutions condemning Frend, and initiated proceedings that would lead to his expulsion from the college and ultimate banishment from the city. The case provoked letters to the papers in Frend’s defence, and he attracted plenty of undergraduate support: slogans such as ‘Frend and Liberty!’ or ‘Frend for Ever!!’ were chalked or daubed on college walls, and even etched in gunpowder on the lawn of Trinity College quadrangle.
Frend’s prosecution could be explained only in terms of the polarised politics of the moment. Though his pamphlet expressed opinions that would have upset many of his colleagues – defending the execution of Louis XVI and opposing the war with France – these could hardly be described as seditious. The Vice-Chancellor virtually admitted that the trial had been a political one when he later asserted that the expulsion of Frend had been ‘the ruin of the Jacobinical party as a University thing’. That this was no isolated event became obvious in the late summer, with the trials of several Scottish radicals. One of these, the Reverend Thomas Fyshe Palmer, a Unitarian minister and a former Fellow of Queen’s College, was sentenced to seven years’ transportation, his crime’ being to have corrected the proofs of a handbill written by a Dundee weaver (deemed to be seditious). Things had come to a pretty pass when former Cambridge Fellows were being shipped off in fetters to Australia.
Frend’s trial in the university court began on 3 May 1793, frequently interrupted by (in the Vice-Chancellor’s words) ‘noisy and tumultuous irregularities of conduct’ from the undergraduates who filled the public gallery, applauding the defendant and heckling his accusers. The university authorities attempted to suppress the rowdiness, and after he had called the Vice-Chancellor’s attention to one young man ostentatiously clapping, the Senior Proctor was given permission to make an arrest. The Proctor hurried into the gallery to seize the miscreant, but too late; the culprit had fled. The young protestor was later identified as ‘S.T. Coleridge, of Jesus College’.
A contemporary report in the Morning Chronicle had the Proctor apprehend the wrong man, who, on being accused of clapping, demonstrated that a deformed arm made him incapable of doing so, producing a barrage of ironic applause from the other undergraduates. (Coleridge himself may have been the source of this anecdote. In an account he gave many years later, the young man arrested had an iron hook instead of a hand. This sounds like a story that improved with age.)
Coleridge escaped with a reprimand, though he seems to have been prominent (if not conspicuous) among Frend’s undergraduate supporters. He had known and admired Frend for the past year and a half, and had absorbed many of his ideas. ‘Mr Frend’s company is by no means invidious,’ he had written teasingly to his elder brother George
(#) – a cautious, caring, respectable person, who had no doubt expressed some concern at Sam’s association with such a prominent dissenter. George stood as unofficial guardian to his baby brother, and had done so since the death of their father in 1781. Coleridge often described George – the most scholarly of his siblings – as a kind of father, though George was only eight years his senior. ‘You have always been a brother to me in kindness and a father in wisdom,’ he wrote to George late in 1792.
(#)
Coleridge was then just twenty (two years younger than Wordsworth), loose-limbed and scruffy, ‘a very gentle Bear’ with long curling black hair, fleshy lips, dark heavy eyebrows and large blue eyes, sometimes distant, sometimes burning with impatient energy. (He believed himself to be ugly, and referred to the ‘fat vacuity’ of his face.
(#)) He had gone up to Cambridge in October 1791, some ten months after Wordsworth left. A child prodigy, Coleridge promised greatness. At the age of three he could read a chapter in the Bible. He read every book that came his way, and showed astonishing retentive power, being able to recite large chunks of any work after only one reading. At school he soon outstripped all the other boys. The youngest of ten children (one of whom died in infancy), he was the favourite of the family. ‘My Father was very fond of me, and I was my mother’s darling,’ he wrote in retrospect; ‘in consequence, I was very miserable.’ His brother Frank, the next youngest, was jealous of this attention. He had one sister, Anne (known as Nancy), five years older, who petted him and became his confidante, listening to his ‘puny sorrows’ and ‘hidden maladies’. Maybe he was a spoiled child; he certainly seems to have been wilful:
… 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 …
(#)
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’.
(#) 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.
