The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge

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(#) Cottle attempted to reconcile them, without success. Southey’s uncle suggested an escape from his quandary: six months’ stay in Lisbon while he pondered his future. He hoped to prise his nephew away from an unfortunate attachment. Edith nobly pressed him to go, as did Southey’s mother. But he did not want it to be thought that he had abandoned Edith. Without telling his uncle, he married her ‘with the utmost privacy’ and left for Portugal a few days later.

Coleridge learned of this plan only a couple of days before. Wounded and angry, he sat down to denounce his former friend in a long, indignant, devastating letter:

O Selfish, money-loving Man! what Principle have you not given up? – Tho’ Death had been the consequence, I would have spit in that man’s Face and called him Liar, who should have spoken the last sentence concerning you, 9 months ago. For blindly did I esteem you. O God! That such a mind should fall in love with that low, dirty, gutter-grubbing Trull, WORLDLY PRUDENCE!!

To Robert Lovell, Southey had cited Coleridge’s indolence as his reason for quitting Pantisocracy, a thrust against a vulnerable part. ‘I have exerted myself more than I could have supposed myself capable,’ protested Coleridge – not just on his own behalf, but on Southey’s too. He instanced his contribution to Joan of Arc and his exertions to improve the remainder: ‘I corrected that and other Poems with greater interest, than I should have felt for my own.’ He had devoted his ‘whole mind and heart’ to Southey’s lectures: ‘you must be conscious, that all the Tug of Brain was mine: and that your Share was little more than Transcription’. He conceded that Southey wrote more easily:

The Truth is – You sate down and wrote – I used to saunter about and think what I should write. And we ought to appreciate our comparative Industry by the quantum of mental exertion, not by the particular mode of it: By the number of Thoughts collected, not by the number of Lines, thro’ which these Thoughts are diffused.

He retraced the history of their ‘connection’: ‘I did not only venerate you for your own Virtues, I prized you as the Sheet Anchor of mine!’ He detailed the ‘constant Nibblings’ that had ‘sloped your descent from Virtue’. Again and again, he said, he had been willing to give Southey the benefit of the doubt: ‘My Heart was never bent from you but by violent strength – and Heaven knows, how it leapt back to esteem and love you.’

Once Southey had allowed himself to be tempted by the Church, Coleridge had ceased to confide in him: ‘I studiously avoided all particular Subjects, I acquainted you with nothing relative to myself … I considered you as one who had fallen back into the Ranks … FRIEND is a very sacred appellation – You were become an Acquaintance, yet one for whom I felt no common tenderness.’ But now everything between them was at an end: ‘This will probably be the last time I shall have occasion to address you.’ He never expected to meet another whom he would love and admire so much. ‘You have left a large Void in my Heart – I know no man big enough to fill it.’

(#)

Perhaps through Godwin, Wordsworth met Basil Montagu, a young lawyer who was reading for the Bar. Though near contemporaries at Cambridge, they seem not to have known each other then. Now they rapidly became friends. Montagu was the illegitimate son of the fourth Earl of Sandwich, then First Lord of the Admiralty, and his mistress, the singer Martha Ray; in 1779 she had been shot outside a theatre where she had been performing by a disappointed suitor, the Reverend James Hackman, vicar of Wiveton in Norfolk, who had been hanged as a result. The story of Montagu’s mother’s murder had been a sensational scandal, recently revived by James Boswell in his Life of Johnson (1791). Poor Montagu was dogged by tragedy; his wife, whom he married soon after quitting Cambridge – against the wishes of his father, who never spoke to him again* (#) – had died in childbirth, leaving him with an infant son, also called Basil. In the wreck of his happiness Montagu was ‘misled by passions wild and strong’; but his careful new friend gently but firmly led him away from these. ‘I consider my having met Wm Wordsworth the most fortunate event of my life,’ Montagu wrote in a memoir.

Montagu introduced Wordsworth to another recent Cambridge graduate, Francis Wrangham, who like Montagu was taking pupils in order to make ends meet. In 1793 – the year of Frend’s trial – Wrangham had failed to obtain an expected Cambridge Fellowship because he was rumoured to be friendly to the French Revolution. Since then he had been ‘vegetating on a curacy’ in Cobham, Surrey, where Wordsworth and Montagu often visited him. Wrangham was another radical, and a would-be poet; he had been in correspondence about his poetry with Coleridge, whom he had known at Cambridge. Now he and Wordsworth began collaborating on a verse satire based on Juvenal – a scholarly form of protest, which Wordsworth later abandoned.

By the summer of 1795, shortage of funds was becoming acute. After almost six months in London, nothing had come of Wordsworth’s plans to write for the newspapers, and none of the money from Raisley Calvert’s legacy had yet materialised. Four and a half years after leaving Cambridge, Wordsworth still had no career, no income and no home of his own. Perhaps worst of all, he was not writing. As Dorothy put it, ‘the unsettled way in which he has hitherto lived in London is altogether unfavourable to mental exertion’.

(#) Meanwhile they still hoped to make a home together. Dorothy had not returned to Forncett, and was staying with friends in the north. There was an idea that she might come to London, and live by translating – a proposal which her Aunt Rawson dismissed as mad’.

Montagu and Wrangham had two young pupils, Azariah and John Frederick Pinney, whose father John Pretor Pinney was a wealthy ‘West Indian’, a Bristol merchant with extensive plantations on Nevis, a sugar-producing island in the Caribbean. As well as a handsome townhouse in Bristol, Pinney Senior owned Racedown Lodge, a large country house in north Dorset. This was not much used by the family, and had been advertised to let (at £42 per annum) as early as 1793, without finding a taker. The younger Pinney now suggested that Wordsworth might like to have it, rent free, with the proviso that he and his brother might come down for the occasional stay, principally to shoot.

Wordsworth seized the offer. Here was a chance to escape from the city, where things had not turned out as he had hoped. In the country, free from temptation or distraction, he could settle down to work. Moreover, it was an opportunity to live with Dorothy; Racedown would be ‘our little cottage’. There they could live simply and frugally, keeping a cow and growing vegetables in the kitchen garden. Dorothy would attend to most of the domestic chores, with the help of only one maidservant (she hoped for ‘a strong girl’). Together they would care for young Basil Montagu, whose father would pay £50 a year for his keep. There was a prospect of at least one other child, a little girl, and perhaps another boy as well, one of the younger Pinney brothers, then in his early teens. Dorothy was fond of children and had experience of looking after them. For her, this was a chance at last to ‘be doing something’:

… it is a painful idea that one’s existence is of very little use which I really have always been obliged to feel; above all it is painful when one is living upon the bounty of one’s friends, a resource of which misfortune may deprive one and then how irksome and difficult it is to find out other means of support, the mind is then unfitted, perhaps, for any new exertions, and continues always in a state of dependence, perhaps attended with poverty.

(#)

Outlining the arguments in favour of the Racedown ‘scheme’ to her friend Jane Pollard (who had recently married John Marshall, a linen manufacturer), Dorothy argued that it would give her brother ‘such opportunities of studying as I hope will be not only advantageous to his mind but his purse’. She hoped that it ‘may put William into a way of getting a more permanent establishment’.

(#)

With the money for the two children, and interest on the capital from Raisley Calvert’s legacy (which was at last beginning to trickle through), Dorothy was confident of an annual income of at least £170 or £180. This should be enough to enable them to live comfortably, and even to make some provision for the future.* (#) There was the prospect of a further £200 a year if her brother’s ‘great hopes’ of having the Pinney boy entrusted to him as tutor were realised.

It was agreed that Wordsworth would travel to Bristol, where he would stay at the Pinneys’ house in Great George Street until Dorothy was able to join him and they could journey on together to Racedown. No doubt John Pretor Pinney wanted to take a good look at this young man who would be occupying his country house. For Wordsworth, there was the added benefit of an opportunity to make new contacts in a city with its own flourishing intellectual life. Among those he met in Bristol, almost in passing, was a young man who had been making a good deal of noise, and whose name he had almost certainly heard already, † (#)

Nobody knows for certain where or when Wordsworth and Coleridge first met, what the circumstances were, or what was said. There are three contradictory stories, each based on reminiscences long after the event. The confusion is not altogether surprising; it is often hard to remember how we met someone who afterwards becomes familiar. Though these two would later become so important to each other, they could scarcely have anticipated this at their first encounter.

What is known is that they met in Bristol during Wordsworth’s five-week stay in the city from around 21 August until 26 September 1795. The proof is in a letter Wordsworth wrote to Mathews from Racedown in October: ‘Coleridge was at Bristol part of the time I was there. I saw but little of him. I wished indeed to have seen more – his talent appears to me very great.’

(#) There is a tradition that the two met at John Pretor Pinney’s house, where Wordsworth was staying, but this may be no more than a guess. One reason for doubting it is the awkwardness of Coleridge’s being received at the house of a prominent ‘West Indian’ only a few months after delivering a public lecture condemning the slave trade. The Bristol Observer had commented on the lecture as ‘proof of the detestation in which he [Coleridge] holds that infamous traffic’. It is hard to imagine Coleridge comfortable as the guest of one of the largest slave-owners in the city, or that Pinney would have welcomed him into his home.

Fifteen years later, the painter Joseph Farington noted in his diary that the two poets had met at a political debating society, ‘where on one occasion Wordsworth spoke with so much force & eloquence that Coleridge was captivated by it & sought to know Him’.

(#) His note was based on a conversation with Lady Beaumont, a woman who had come to know both men well (but who had not known them at the time); though one might suspect that in being told to her, and then by her, the story had become garbled, and that Coleridge rather than Wordsworth had been the speaker. Another cause for doubt is the explanation of how they became acquainted. Coleridge was on record as an admirer of Wordsworth’s poetry; he would not have needed to hear Wordsworth speak in order to want to know him.

Half a century afterwards, Wordsworth tried to recall the circumstances of the meeting for Coleridge’s daughter Sara. Confessing that he did not have ‘as distinct a remembrance as he could wish’, he told her ‘the impression upon his mind’ was that he had seen her father and her mother together with her uncle Southey and her aunt Edith ‘in a lodging in Bristol’.

(#) If Wordsworth’s memory can be relied upon, the Frickers’ home in Redcliffe Hill seems the most likely location for the meeting – though why Wordsworth should have been there remains unexplained. One should remember that at this stage neither of the couples was married. The Fricker sisters had attracted plenty of unpleasant comment because of their association with the Pantisocrats; they would surely not have wanted to risk their reputations further by visiting the young men’s cramped bachelor lodgings in College Street.

(#)

There is another difficulty with the story. ‘I met with Southey also,’ Wordsworth continued his letter to Mathews – which makes it sound as if this happened on a different occasion. By now relations between Coleridge and Southey were strained; Coleridge later claimed to have used the most scrupulous care’ to avoid Southey after his return from Shurton in mid-September. Wordsworth went on to describe Southey’s qualities: ‘his manners pleased me exceedingly and I have every reason to think very highly of his powers of mind … 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 me to have less of that character …’ At Southey’s invitation Wordsworth read some passages of Joan of Arc, then in press; and Southey contributed a couple of lines to Wordsworth’s Juvenalian satire – which Wordsworth later told Wrangham were the two best verses in it.

(#) This sounds like a relaxed encounter, more relaxed than one might have expected had Coleridge been there at the same time. Perhaps, then, Wordsworth’s memory should not be relied upon, and in fact he met Coleridge and Southey separately.

Despite so much uncertainty, the available fragments of evidence make it possible to date their meeting to within the space of only a few days.