Coleridge: Early Visions

His thoughts turned instead to Frank out in India; he wrote him an affectionate letter (which has not survived), and while walking nostalgically in the Ottery churchyard had a long talk about his “most wonderful prospects” with a relative of the Governor-General of India, who said he would recommend him. Coleridge noted, with a touch of the old rivalry, that his mother “positively drank in” such dreams of Frank’s advancement. He told George, rather defensively, that he was studying Cicero hard and was determined to fulfil the expectations he had created for himself at Cambridge: “God forbid that I should perish” – this from Homer’s Iliad – “without effort and without renown.” No one in England yet knew that Frank had already committed suicide at Seringapatam.

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4

His second year at Jesus College was certainly an active one. Exams, university politics, drinking, debts, and a growing infatuation with Mary Evans, all swept him in a ceaseless whirlpool of pleasures and anxieties. Though later he would characteristically say: “I became a proverb to the University for Idleness.”

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His academic targets were probably far too ambitious, particularly now that his mentor Middleton had left Pembroke (without obtaining the expected Fellowship). His fellow undergraduates at Jesus were largely taken up with the cause célèbre of their radical tutor William Frend, who was tried in the Senate for religious blasphemy. Coleridge became a chief organiser of the Frend faction,

(#litres_trial_promo) and by 1793 his rooms were a renowned centre both for political and literary discussions held long into the night.

Val Le Grice’s brother, Charles (the inimitable Val had lost his Exhibition because of drunkenness, evidently a Grecian weakness), decorously recalled what were obviously rowdy and undecorous sessions with Coleridge in full flow. “What evenings I have spent in those rooms!…when Aeschylus, and Plato, and Thucydides were pushed aside, with a pile of lexicons etc, to discuss the pamphlets of the day. Ever and anon, a pamphlet issued from the pen of Burke. There was no need of having the book before us. Coleridge had read it in the morning, and in the evening he would repeat whole pages verbatim.”

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Vendettas were also pursued against the more conservative Jesus dons. Coleridge told Mary Evans of his taunting of Mr Newton their Mathematics Tutor, even to the point of harassing the tutor’s doctor who had been so unwise as to treat him for a fever that had conveniently prevented him lecturing: “six of his duteous pupils, myself as their General, sallied forth to the Apothecary’s house with a fixed determination to thrash him for having performed so speedy a cure – but luckily for himself the Rascal was not at home.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Slogans such as “Frend and Liberty” were daubed on the college walls, and at the height of the agitation even burnt in gunpowder on the sacred turf of Trinity College quadrangle.

Amidst these stirring events, and the increasingly exciting despatches from Paris, Coleridge sat for his exams and prizes. In December he was selected by Professor Porson as one of the seventeen undergraduates in the university to take the prestigious Craven Scholarship, and by January 1793 was in the last four finalists. “We circumnavigated the Encyclopaedia – so very severe an examination was never remembered.” In April he sat again for the annual Rustat Exams, and in June again competed for the Brown Medal – submitting a Greek Ode on Astronomy.

His results were not undistinguished, though clearly his family were disappointed. The Rustat Scholarship was renewed, and he came second in the Brown Medal (the winner was Keate, subsequently Shelley’s headmaster at Eton, the notorious “Flogger” Keate). The Craven was given to the youngest finalist, Christopher Bethell, who later became Bishop of Bangor. But the Master of Jesus, Dr Pearce, was so pleased with Coleridge’s performance that he awarded him the college “Chapel Clerk’s Place”, which brought him a further £33 per annum towards his expenses. It also required Coleridge – for Pearce was a shrewd man – to attend chapel at least four mornings a week, no doubt intended as a check on his nocturnal activities.

For several weeks after the effort of the Craven, he was confined to his rooms with an abscessed tooth, and wrote a teasing series of letters to Mary. One, enclosing a spirited imitation of Ossian’s poetry, concluded: “Are you asleep, my dear Mary? – I have administered rather a strong Dose of Opium –: however, if in the course of your Nap you should chance to dream, that – I am with the ardour/of fraternal friendship/Your affectionate S. T. Coleridge – you will never have dreamt a truer dream in all your born days.”

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5

One thing that Coleridge did not tell Mary in his letters, or George, was of his involvement in William Frend’s trial before the University Vice-Chancellor throughout the month of May 1793. Frend had published a pamphlet, Peace and Union, which became famous in the university that spring. Not only did it attack Anglican doctrines of faith, it also criticised the British declaration of war against France, and argued that Prime Minister Pitt was deliberately oppressing the poor weavers of the Midlands with war taxation. Deist and republican in tone, it strongly appealed to undergraduates like Coleridge who were questioning their own Christian beliefs, and who were fascinated by the egalitarian ideas of the French Revolution. The charge was a serious one, “sedition and defamation of the Church of England”, and the case eventually went before the Court of King’s Bench in London, that autumn, where the proceedings were recorded in the State Trials for that year.

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The atmosphere at the university had become both politicised and polarised. Not only was Tom Paine burnt in effigy; several dissenting tradesmen in the town had their business premises wrecked and were forced, like Priestley, to emigrate. A Patriotic Declaration by 112 tavern-keepers promised to report any undergraduates to the local magistrates who showed “treasonable or seditious tendencies” in their pubs and inns “by public conversation or by public reading, or circulation of any books, pamphlets, or papers”.

(#litres_trial_promo) The university authorities regarded Frend’s trial as crucial, and the Vice-Chancellor later wrote: “I don’t believe Pitt was ever aware of how much consequence the expulsion of Frend was: it was the ruin of the Jacobinical party as a University thing…”

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From 1793 to 1796 Coleridge would flirt with many of the ideas of the English Jacobins, as he later freely admitted in private correspondence. Yet he always denied it in his public statements after 1800, and censored his own lectures and newspaper articles accordingly when they were later republished – another clear example of his reconstructed autobiography. This flirtation began at Jesus when, as Charles Le Grice noted, Coleridge’s rooms became a centre of the Frend faction, and during the trial “pamphlets swarmed from the press. Coleridge had read them all; and in the evenings, with our negus, we had them viva voce gloriously.”

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Coleridge attended the trial in the public gallery of the Senate House, during eight days in May, and was one of the ringleaders of what the Vice-Chancellor described as “the noisy and tumultuous irregularities of conduct” which frequently interrupted the proceedings.

(#litres_trial_promo) On one particular day the clapping and heckling became so bad that the Senior Proctor, Mr Farish, was sent to arrest “one man who had particularly distinguished himself”, his position in the gallery having been carefully noted. This offender was in fact Coleridge; but when Farish pushed through the crowd and seized the man’s shoulder, he discovered that it was an undergraduate with a deformed arm who was quite incapable of clapping. The error produced a barrage of ironic applause, “which continued for some minutes”. What had actually occurred was observed by a Junior Fellow, Henry Gunning, who subsequently included the incident in a history of Cambridge life at this period.

The name of the young man was Charnock, and his college was Clare Hall; the real culprit was S. T. Coleridge, of Jesus College, who having observed that the Proctor had noticed him, and was coming into the Gallery, turned round to the person who was standing behind him, and made an offer of changing places, which was gladly accepted by the unsuspecting man. Coleridge immediately retreated, and mixing with the crowd, entirely escaped suspicion. This conduct on the part of Coleridge, was severely censured by the Undergraduates as it was quite clear that, to escape punishment himself, he would have subjected an innocent man to rustication or expulsion.

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Coleridge, not surprisingly, gave rather different versions of this escapade to later friends. To his newspaper editor, Daniel Stuart, who once accompanied him on a nostalgic trip to Cambridge in 1812, he recast the incident as a piece of high farce: Charnock was a man with “an iron hook” instead of a hand, and the kindly Proctor, “well knowing” that Coleridge was the real culprit who might be expelled, deliberately picked on a man who could not possibly be blamed.

(#litres_trial_promo) Later still, he told James Gillman that after Charnock’s arrest, he went directly to the Proctor’s office and confessed “that no innocent person should incur blame”. Farish told him that he had “a narrow escape”, and let him off.

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This may be true, though it is odd that Gunning does not mention it. Yet the pattern of extravagant behaviour, followed by remorseful confession to the authorities, is one that further emerges in 1793 and thenceforth recurs throughout Coleridge’s life, and is surely significant. Gunning’s only other comment is that Coleridge was by now renowned throughout the university for brilliant classical scholarship, flamboyant talk, and peculiar political views.

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6

There was no doubt that after Coleridge’s failure to win the Craven Scholarship, his whole attitude to academic success altered. There was now little chance that he would obtain a Fellowship, and his secret religious doubts made a conventional career in the Church impossible – though George still hoped for one. It is indicative that the other three finalists either became bishops – as, also, did Middleton – or celebrated public school headmasters.

Yet this failure can be seen as an immensely liberating one: it saved Coleridge from a safe, Establishment career (as pursued by his brothers in the Church and the army), and threw him back on his inner, imaginative resources, which drew him powerfully and naturally towards poetry, religious speculation, metaphysics, and the political idealism of the time. But unable to explain these wayward longings to his brothers, it also brought intense guilt. He began to live a kind of double life at Cambridge, his wild expenditure on books, drinking, violin lessons, theatre and whoring (he later described this as the time of his “unchastities”) alternating with fits of suicidal gloom and remorse. These were deepened by the news of Frank’s death, which finally reached him soon after the scholarship results, and filled him with depression.

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The first of many plans for reform, announced to George, now significantly included his earliest scheme to publish poetry.

I am now employing myself omni Marte in translating the best Lyric Poems from the Greek, and the modern Latin Writers – which I mean in about half a year’s time to publish by Subscription. By means of Caldwell, Tucket, & Middleton I can ensure more than two hundred Subscribers – so that this and frugality will enable me to pay off my debts, which have corroded my Spirits greatly for some time Past. – I owe about £50 to my Tutor – and about £8 elsewhere…I think therefore of staying all the Summer in Cambridge…I have been lesson’d by the wholesome discipline of Experience.

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Meanwhile his letters to Mary Evans continued to describe wine parties, “swingeing Impositions” from the Dean, the radical politics of the opposition leader Charles James Fox – “quite the political Go at Cambridge” – and the performances of Mrs Siddons, which suggest that he was already making clandestine visits to London. “And why should not a man amuse himself sometimes? Vive la bagatelle!”

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By July, his finances were in such a state that he was forced to go down to Ottery for the vacation, to confront James and George with his debts: from £58 they had suddenly grown to the remarkable sum of £148 17sl

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d, a figure of delusory accuracy.

(#litres_trial_promo) He confessed some at least of his “follies”, and after a severe family conference, fraternal cash was provided to pay off some of these at the commencement of the Michaelmas term. Meanwhile he embarked on his customary tour of relations in Salisbury, Exeter and Tiverton.

The atmosphere was now subtly different from the scholarly triumph of the previous year: there was much drinking and arguing with Edward, much flirtation with local girls, and considerably more poetry. At Salisbury he first glimpsed Bowles crossing the market-place, but did not dare to speak to him; at Exeter he attended a literary society at which a newly published poem, “An Evening Walk”, by an unknown writer, William Wordsworth, was read out and praised.

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He wrote unguardedly to George in August: “I stayed at Tiverton about 10 days, and got no small kudos among the young Belles by complimentary effusions in the poetic Way…Do you know Fanny Nesbitt? She was my fellow-traveller in the Tiverton diligence from Exeter. – I think a very pretty Girl.”

(#litres_trial_promo) This suggests that he was seeking consolation for Mary Evans having already decided that his love for her was ill-starred because of his lack of academic prospects: though he had not plucked up courage to declare himself, and indeed would never do so until the very end of the affair in November 1794.

(#litres_trial_promo) The poems of this summer included, besides various pieces “of the namby pamby Genius”, his “Sonnet: To the River Otter”, and a long sentimental Ode set in the Pixies’ Parlour at Ottery, “Songs of the Pixies”. Here he presents himself in the melancholy manner of Bowles, as the sorrowing, lonely, lovelorn young poet: