Coleridge: Early Visions

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Coleridge was back in London for the Christmas vacation by 11 December, where he was to remain for a month, lodging at the Salutation & Cat, furiously writing letters and poetry, and trying to decide if he should really leave the university. In theory the Pantisocratic expedition was still scheduled for March or April 1795, but none of the £2,000 capital had been raised, and various alternatives had to be considered.

Southey, still demanding his immediate presence in Bath, proposed with Lovell a preliminary scheme to go shares in a Welsh farm where they could learn agricultural skills before departing. He was also arguing that they should take servants to do the manual labour, and that the women should have exclusive charge of the children and domestic work. Coleridge described all these compromises succinctly as “nonsense”, and continued the debate of first principles.

(#litres_trial_promo) But having still not settled matters with Mary Evans, he was in a growing panic about Sara Fricker, and felt he had written to her “like an hypocrite”. For the time being it was arranged that Southey would return with him to Cambridge in the New Year, to argue out the Welsh scheme, and help raise money from his Imitations.66 Meanwhile Burnett and Lovell would prospect for farms in Caernarvonshire or Merioneth.

But London now presented all sorts of exciting opportunities for Coleridge. With his sonnets being published, he met Perry, the editor of the Morning Chronicle, and discussed a future in journalism. He spent lively evenings with William Godwin and Thomas Holcroft, the leading radical writers, who cross-questioned him about Pantisocracy.

Godwin, then thirty-eight, was at the height of his fame, having followed Political Justice (1793) with his intellectual gothic thriller Caleb Williams (1794), which became a bestseller. He was still advocating atheism and anti-matrimonialism (he had not yet formed his liaison with Mary Wollstonecraft), and this deeply shocked Coleridge. But the celebrated philosopher and the wild young poet fiercely argued the merits of atheism and Unitarian belief, and a close friendship was later to form that Godwin would describe as one of the most influential in his life.

(#litres_trial_promo) Holcroft – “he absolutely infests you with Atheism” – outraged Coleridge by his “Blasphemy against the divinity of a Bowles!” It is clear that the Pantisocrat was not in the mood to be overawed by these distinguished introductions: “my great coolness and command of impressive Language certainly did him over.”

Meanwhile George Dyer, perhaps attempting some gentle delaying tactics to keep Coleridge in England, came up with a possible post for him as a family tutor to the Earl of Buchan.

(#litres_trial_promo) On top of all this, brother George was still assiduously making “liberal proposals” for financing a career at the Bar. Coleridge, as so often in his later life, found himself drifting among an embarrassment of siren possibilities, vaguely and good-naturedly trying to please and charm everybody, but at heart deeply confused and temperamentally incapable of imposing himself decisively upon events. Pantisocracy and poetry were still his real passions. But he was discovering his genius for prevarication.

One advantage of this was the easy and undemanding friendship which now developed with schoolfellow and junior Grecian, Charles Lamb. Lamb was living nearby at the Inner Temple with his aged parents and invalid elder sister, Mary, whom he adored. He had taken a clerkship at the East India Office to support them all, and dedicated his evenings to literature and drinking. His fine pixieish wit and cultivated, bookish eccentricity were enhanced by a nervous stutter and inexhaustible supply of puns. Tall, shy and depressive, with one eye blue and one eye brown, he was drawn like a moth to the spinning, phosphorescent conversations that took place each night at the Salutation & Cat. His gentle hero-worship was exactly what Coleridge needed at this juncture. Long, alcoholic evenings passed effortlessly away in the tavern snug, fuelled by egg-flip and heady clouds of oronoko tobacco, while they exchanged new sonnets and emotional intimacies of their tortured love-lives.

A revealing topic that emerged in common – among all the high talk of philosophy, religion, and Pantisocracy – was a shared attachment for their sisters. Charles talked fondly of Mary, Coleridge reminisced lyrically about the Evans sisters and about his own dear, dead sister Nancy Coleridge. This depth of curious, asexual, but genuinely fraternal feeling tells as much of Coleridge’s struggles between Mary Evans and Sara Fricker (both essentially part of sisterly families) as any of his melodramatic outpourings to Southey.

Moreover, it produced one of Coleridge’s most striking early poems in the “Conversational” mode which was later to become so important in his work: an intimate, low-key, blank verse style very close to his most personal letters. Back in September he had written a touching and unexpected note to Edith Fricker (rather than Sara), in which he fondly recalled 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…My Sister, like you, was beautiful and accomplished – like you, she was lowly of Heart…I know, and feel, that I am your Brother.”

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He now versified these sentiments to Lamb, finding a new naturalness of phrase and grace of rhythm, which has the startling inevitability of a completely original, spontaneous kind of Romantic self-declaration. It is a landmark in his work.

In Fancy, well I know,

Thou creepest round a dear-lov’d Sister’s Bed

With noiseless step, and watchest the faint Look

Soothing each Pang with fond Solicitudes

And tenderest Tones medicinal of Love.

I too a Sister had – an only Sister –

She loved me dearly – and I doted on her –

On her soft Bosom I repos’d my Cares,

And gaind’ for every wound an healing Tear.

To her I pour’d forth all my puny Sorrows,

(As a sick Patient in his Nurse’s arms)

And of the Heart those hidden Maladies

That shrink asham’d from even Friendship’s Eye.

O! I have woke at midnight, and have wept

Because she was not!…

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Love here expresses itself as tenderness, confidentiality, and – once again – as maternal nursing. Charles Lamb nurses, and Coleridge – in his careful parenthesis – is nursed. Love is a form of healing, for both of them.

The intimacy of the poem is a great advance on most of the public sonnets, and allowed Coleridge even to allude amusingly to Lamb’s fondness for puns, describing Mary’s polished wit “as mild as lambent Glories/That play around an holy Infant’s head”. Coleridge gave him the poem together with an early manuscript draft of “Religious Musings” (dated Christmas Eve, 1794), the long philosophic piece which he here dismissed as “Elaborate & swelling – but the Heart / Not owns it”. This, too, indicates his own sense of breaking through to a more powerful and direct verse form, in which spontaneity of feeling and simplicity of expression become important new values.

Coleridge admired and even envied the relationship between Lamb and his sister (“Her mind is elegantly stored – her Heart feeling”), as he would later be attracted by the relationship between Wordsworth and Dorothy. And it was probably this kind of closeness and love that he wished, above all, from Mary Evans.

But it was not to be. On 24 December he finally received a letter confirming Mary Evans’ engagement. He wrote a short, concluding note in reply, honourably free of all reproach: “To love you Habit has made unalterable. This passion however, divested, as it now is, of all Shadow of Hope, will lose its disquieting power. Far distant from you I shall journey thro’ the vale of Men in calmness…I have burnt your Letters – forget mine – and that I have pained you, forgive me! May God infinitely love you.”

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On 29 December he informed Southey of this outcome. But he was now almost brutally frank about his dilemma over Sara Fricker in a letter which acknowledges the disturbing element of sexual enticement he felt: “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! – Enough! These Refinements are the wildering Fires that lead me into Vice. Mark you, Southey! – I will do my Duty.”

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But what was his duty now? London, Cambridge, Bath, Wales, America – in which direction should he go? How could he best pursue the Pantisocratic dream? Coleridge sat on in the snug at the Salutation & Cat, smoking and drinking and talking with Lamb, in a haze of indecision, into the New Year 1795. Southey, sweeping aside delicacies, insisted that he must come to Bath immediately. Coleridge replied, in a fantastical letter, that he would come down “helter skelter” on a local farm cart, the two-mile-an-hour “Flying Wagon”, wrapped up in hay, “fraternizing” with the calves, and well supplied with gin and oronoko. “I shall be with you by Wednesday [7th January], I suppose.”

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Southey took this proposal literally, and was full of amazed indignation when, having walked to Marlborough with Lovell to intercept the Flying Wagon, it failed to deliver its Pantisocratic contents. By 11 January he was himself in London, “to reclaim his stray”, who even then proved elusive. “I went to the Salutation and Cat – a most foul stye – no Coleridge,” he told Edith Fricker. “I went to Christ’s Hospital…where is Coleridge?” Finally he was located with Lamb in the Unitarian Chapel, seeking divine guidance. They had a difficult dinner together.

“Coleridge objected to Wales and thought it best to find some situation in London till we could prosecute our original plan. He talks of tutorage – a public office – a newspaper one for me. I went to bed in dirty sheets – and tost and turned, cold, weary and heart sick till seven in the morning.”

(#litres_trial_promo) It was a low moment for Pantisocracy. Southey’s letter shows how much he counted on Coleridge’s support, increasingly anxious about his own marriage to Edith, his retreating work prospects, and the financial difficulties at Bath. It was this appeal to Coleridge’s generosity and easy good nature, as much as any bullying over Sara Fricker, that finally convinced Coleridge that his Pantisocratic “duty” lay in the West Country. By the end of January 1795 his university degree, his career at the Bar, his London journalism were all abandoned. The three Pantisocrats – Coleridge, Southey and Burnett – were established in their first commune, a cramped apartment at 25 College Green, Bristol.

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The story of the ensuing ten months in Bristol has been told (notably by Coleridge himself) in terms of the inevitable and comic collapse of naive Pantisocratic ideals when exposed to the mundane realities of human nature. Family pressures, financial difficulties, temperamental differences between Coleridge and Southey and Lovell, can all be seen as the inescapable emergence of the Old Adam in such unworldly dreams. It was what Tom Poole had already foreseen at Stowey: and what Coleridge himself revealed in a long, bitter, retrospective letter to Southey of November 1795, in which he referred contemptuously to “the Mouse of which the Mountain Pantisocracy was at last safely delivered!”

(#litres_trial_promo) But this is far from being the whole story, or the whole truth.

In the first place, the Susquehanna scheme did become a reality in other hands, and had considerable influence on radical thinking in England at this time. In January 1795 the British Critic carried a long article on the rival emigration schemes for the Susquehanna and for Kentucky, which were being promoted by Thomas Cooper and Gilbert Imlay. Though it mocked them as “two rival auctioneers, or rather show-men, stationed for the allurement of incautious passengers”, it acknowledged the growing popularity of such expeditions among Quakers, Unitarians, and other idealistic freethinkers. By 1796 it was calculated that some 2,000 people had set out, though many returned disillusioned.

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