Coleridge: Early Visions

TWO ORPHAN OF THE STORM (#ulink_d3e5278a-87d5-534c-acd3-72bae5039ce7)

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Whatever the quality of Coleridge’s happiness at Ottery, everything changed just before his ninth birthday, with the sudden and wholly unexpected death of his father, the Reverend John, in October 1781. The circumstances suggest considerable stress within the family.

It had been decided – perhaps because of the rivalry and battles between the two youngest brothers – to send Frank into the navy at the early age of twelve. He was signed on as a junior midshipman under Admiral Graves, a family friend, and taken to Plymouth with his small sea-chest by his father, where he joined a convoy for Bengal. It must have been a heart-breaking parting, for the Reverend John, then aged sixty-two, could not realistically expect to see the boy again.

He returned from Plymouth via Exeter on 4 October, evidently upset, and having – according to Coleridge – dreamed a strange allegorical dream, that Death “as he is commonly painted” had touched him with his dart. He drank a bowl of punch, went to bed, and died that same night of a massive heart attack. Coleridge always remembered his mother’s “shriek” in the night, and his instant realisation that “Papa is dead”. He may have felt some sense of childish responsibility for his father’s loss (if he had quarrelled less with Frank, it might never have happened); or he may obscurely have blamed his mother for forcing one more premature departure from Ottery. Certainly in later life he came to fear his own death at night from “a fit of Apoplexy”. At all events, the sense of bereavement was very strong, and henceforth he would often refer to himself as an “orphan”. He was not quite nine.

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His life now altered rapidly. Ann Coleridge lost her position and income, and almost immediately the family moved out of the spacious Vicarage and School House, into temporary lodgings provided by Sir Stafford Northcote in the Warden’s House nearby. Of the children still nominally at home, George was at Oxford, Luke at medical school, both with fees to pay. She was now largely dependent on what James, still making his way in the army, and John, far away in India, could provide. It was decided that Nancy would have to get work as a shop-assistant in a milliner’s at Exeter; and Sam would have to be sent to a boarding school on a charity grant. That winter he was temporarily allowed to continue as a day scholar, without fees, at the King’s School by the new headmaster Parson Warren. Sam pronounced his father’s replacement to be a “booby”, and picked holes in his grammar-teaching, “every detraction from his merits seemed an oblation to the memory of my Father”.

(#litres_trial_promo) Plans for Charterhouse fell through, and Judge Buller recommended a formal application to Christ’s Hospital, London, originally founded for the sons of needy clergy, famous throughout the city as “blue-coat charity boys”. It was the same uniform that Thomas Chatterton had once worn in Bristol.

On 28 March 1782, Sam’s godfather Mr Samuel Taylor drew up the petition to Christ’s Hospital, countersigned by the new vicar the Reverend Fulwood Smerdon MA. (The job of vicar and headmaster had now been divided, a final testimony to the Reverend John’s great abilities.) Ann’s financial anxieties were emphasised by the rather misleading way she was described as being left “with a Family of Eleven Children, whom she finds it difficult to maintain and educate without assistance”. She also agreed to “the right of the Governors of Christ’s Hospital to apprentice her son”, if Sam did not prove academically promising.

(#litres_trial_promo) This clause effectively put Sam’s destiny in the hands of the Christ’s Hospital authorities, and did indeed make him the child of an institution. Family worries about this were to be expressed most forcibly by John in India, when he later wrote from Surat enclosing a handsome £200, and urging James not to neglect Sam’s education “in any respect whatever”, and suggesting he seek the help of “his very good friend” General Godard. John, incidentally, also strongly objected to the plan for Nancy: “I would rather live all the rest of my days on Bread and Water than see my sister standing behind a counter where she is hourly open to the insults of every conceited young Puppy that may chance to purchase a Yard of Ribbon from her.”

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James, however, busily seeking promotion from his captaincy, does not seem to have bothered much with Sam, content to pursue his own very successful career. He became a lieutenant-colonel in the Exmouth and Sidmouth Volunteers, married a local heiress Frances Taylor in 1788, and by 1796 was able to purchase the Chanter’s House at Ottery, thus becoming – as Coleridge said with some irony – “a respectable Man”. John, on the other hand, continued to worry about his little brother up to the time of his own death. In one of his last letters from Bengal in 1785, he wrote to James: “I have been thinking these some days past of getting Sam, a couple of years hence, sent out to me as Cadet at the India House. Let me know your sentiments on this scheme…”

(#litres_trial_promo) Thoughts of John, and Frank, far away in India were to have subtle influence on Sam’s restless dreams in the future.

Frank’s convoy had been met at Bombay by his brother John, who arranged for his transfer from the navy to the Indian army as a subaltern. Dashing and high-spirited (“the young dog is as fond of his sword as a girl is of a new lover,” wrote John approvingly), Frank was promoted to an ensign of infantry in 1784, and served with distinction for eight years, until wounded in a night-attack on Seringapatam. His commanding officer, Lord Cornwallis, presented him with a gold watch for his gallantry. But Frank contracted a fever, and shot himself in delirium soon after, dying in 1792 aged twenty-two.

Coleridge was much impressed by this romantic military career, which came to seem a reproach for his own fecklessness at Cambridge (as his mother no doubt pointed out), and later composed a fictional sketch of Frank’s upbringing in his poem “The Foster Mother’s Tale”, which ends with a haunting image of the young man’s loss in the distant “golden lands”. Characteristically, the fever and suicide is transformed into a moonlit voyage up an imaginary river. The “poor mad youth”

…seized a boat,

And all alone, set sail by silent moonlight

Up a great river, great as any sea,

And ne’er was heard of more: but ‘tis suppos’d

He liv’d and died among the savage men.

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Sam was accepted at Christ’s Hospital (probably through the influence of Judge Buller) for the Michaelmas term of 1782, with a six-week preliminary attendance at the preparatory school at Hertford beginning in July. If Ann Coleridge did not wish to be parted from her youngest child, there is no sign of this, for she immediately despatched him to London in April to spend the spring and summer with her brother John Bowdon. The impression that she was glad to have him off her hands is increased by the remarkable fact that he was not allowed back to Ottery, during the brief Christmas and summer vacations, more than three or possibly four times over the next nine years. Significantly, Coleridge left no memory of his parting from his mother at Ottery, except in a sonnet of 1791 when he refers rather formally to how his

weeping childhood, torn

By early sorrow from my native seat,

Mingled its tears with hers – my widow’d Parent lorn.

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Nor is there much evidence of correspondence between school and home: of his seven known schoolboy letters, only one is to his mother; another is to Luke, and the remaining five are to George, whose role as father-figure became increasingly evident.

The first three months in London with Uncle Bowdon – who kept a tobacconist’s near the Stock Exchange and was also a part-time clerk for an underwriter – were recalled with immense and comic satisfaction by Coleridge. Far from grieving for the countryside of Ottery, he revelled in his first experience of the big city, and felt his wings as a talker and social being. Bowdon was a kindly, generous man but also a drinker – “a Sot” who was “fleeced unmercifully” by his servant in the shop, and bullied at home by “an ugly and an artful” daughter. Sam accompanied him on his frequent escapes to the taverns, and had his first unforgettable taste of the great talking-shop of London, the Johnsonian world of clubs and coffee-houses, with its last echoes of the elegant, rakish Augustan society of Steele and Addison.

It was all highly unsuitable for a child of nine and a half, and pleased him no end. “My Uncle was very proud of me, & used to carry me from Coffee-house to Coffee-house, and Tavern to Tavern, where I drank, & talked & disputed, as if I had been a man –. Nothing was more common than for a large party to exclaim in my hearing, that I was aprodigy etc etc etc – so that, while I remained at my Uncle’s, I was most completely spoilt & pampered, both mind and body.”

(#litres_trial_promo) But this vision of forbidden, urban, adult delights – which attracted Coleridge’s gregarious nature all his life – was merely a prologue to the tribal, schoolboy horrors to come.

In July he “donned the Blue coat & yellow stockings”, and went down to the prep school at Hertford for six weeks, where he was briefly very happy – “for I had plenty to eat & drink, & pudding & vegetables almost every day”. Then, in September 1782, he was delivered up to the Under Grammar School of Christ’s Hospital, one small boy among 600, with his private world reduced to an iron bedstead in a “ward” or dormitory of fifteen others. For the next three years his existence was remembered with self-pity and righteous indignation: “Oh, what a change! depressed, moping, friendless, poor orphan, half starved”.

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These early, beastly memories of Christ’s Hospital have a familiar ring, and variations can be found in the schooldays of many English writers: Shelley, Dickens, or Kipling. The rising bell at 6 a.m.; the miserable food, consisting largely of bread, thin porridge, and bad beer – and “never any vegetables”; the heartless “Nurse” or dormitory matron, who scrubbed him with stinging sulphur ointment against ringworm; the ill-fitting clog shoes and the nauseous stench of the communal boot-room and lavatories; the flogging in the classrooms and the loneliness in the cloisters. He later indignantly told Godwin that he was treated with “contumely & brutality”, and frequently took refuge “in a sunny corner, shutting his eyes, & imagining himself at home”.

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There is however evidence that Coleridge, with his verbal fluency (despite the Devon accent which he retained all his life), and his powerful, moody temperament (sometimes utterly withdrawn, sometimes exuberantly outgoing and wild) stood up quite well to the ordeal. Despite the “excessive subordination” to senior boys required, there was little overt suggestion of bullying or homosexuality. Though it is true that in his adult dreams nightmares of Christ’s Hospital would often surface, suggesting more subtle forms of persecution, physical humiliations and, above all, profound, almost disabling homesickness. Many of these dreams would centre on the headmaster, James Bowyer, who became a dominating figure in the later part of his schooling.

Coleridge’s first known letter home, which dates from February 1785 – when he was twelve – says almost nothing of school life, but mentions a litany of Ottery friends he wishes to greet, and a careful enumeration of small presents sent to him: “two handkerchiefs and the half-a-crown from Mr. Badcock…a half-a-crown from Mrs Smerdon, but…not a word of the plumb cake…My aunt [Bowdon] was so kind as to accommodate me with a box”. It was a stiff, schoolboy performance, with only tiny glimpses of his real life and thoughts: “I suppose my sister Anna’s beauty has many admirers. My brother Luke says that Burke’s Art of Speaking would be of great use to me.” It is signed rather formally to his mother, “your dutiful son”; but has a revealing concession in its postscript: “P.S. Give my kind love to Molly.”

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At this period Christ’s Hospital was sharply distinguished from the great public schools such as Eton (attended by Shelley), Harrow (Byron) or Westminster (Southey), with their aristocratic connections, anarchic regimes, and in-built sense of class privileges. There were no riots, no underground magazines, no tutorial friendships between boys and masters, no freedoms outside school hours. It was a highly conservative institution, largely funded by philanthropists from the City of London, with spartan facilities and food, lengthy church attendances, and strictly practical aims for most of its pupils.

The main building, founded by Edward VI in 1552, on the site of a Franciscan friary, stood on Newgate Street close to the prison burnt down by the Gordon Rioters in 1780. To the south rose the dome of St Paul’s, to the east was the Bank of England, to the west the Smithfield Meat Market and the Inns of Court. The boys ate together in the Great Hall with pictures of its benefactors gazing down upon them, attended the church in a special gallery above the nave, and played in a walled and cloistered courtyard. Except on leave-days they were forbidden to go out into the city streets – though there are early records of Coleridge’s truancy – and there was a single long vacation of three weeks during the summer.

Of the three main school divisions, the Writing School prepared boys for commercial apprenticeships at the age of fourteen or fifteen; the Mathematical and Drawings Schools sent boys into the navy and the East India Company at the age of sixteen; and the Grammar School retained the brightest pupils for professional careers in the law, the army, or the Church. The most gifted of these, directly supervised by James Bowyer, were put into a Classical Sixth Form, known as the Deputy Grecians, and from there three or four boys a year – distinguished as the Grecians, with special uniforms and privileges – would go on to Oxford or Cambridge.

The powerful sense of intellectual hierarchy, which affected Coleridge for the rest of his life, inculcated fear and respect for all social authority. When a Grecian walked through the cloisters every other boy was expected to get out of his way. All discipline was enforced by Bowyer with savage and frequent flogging. There was great rivalry between the boys concerning the social standing of parents, and outside gifts of food and money – well reflected in Coleridge’s letters. Nearly half the boys were “orphans” (usually from a widowed family), and the daily Christ’s Hospital hymn referred humiliatingly to their charity status. Coleridge’s frequent references to himself as an orphan, poor and neglected, partly reflect this intense consciousness of status throughout his time at Christ’s Hospital.

Despite the severity of the institution – or perhaps because of it – the school did produce at this time a number of notable literary men and scholars, all from the ranks of the Grecians. Among these were Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, the poet George Dyer, Thomas Barnes (the future editor of The Times), and Thomas Middleton (a classical scholar who became the first Bishop of Calcutta). Of these, Lamb and Middleton were Coleridge’s fellow pupils, the former two years junior, the latter two years senior. All retained vivid and painful memories of Christ’s Hospital.

Lamb, who would later become one of Coleridge’s most faithful friends and confidants, touchingly projected himself into the older boy’s homesickness. In “Christs Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years Ago” (1820), Lamb – as Elia – wrote in Coleridge’s imagined voice of schoolboy grief: “My parents and those who should care for me were far away…How, in my dreams, would my native town (far in the west) come back, with its church, and trees, and faces! How I would wake weeping, and in the anguish of my heart exclaim upon sweet Calne in Wiltshire!” Lamb altered Ottery to Calne (the Wiltshire town where Coleridge wrote his own memoirs of Christ’s Hospital in the Biographia) to avoid upsetting the Ottery Coleridges with accusations of – perhaps romanticised – neglect.

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Coleridge’s own private recollections have a somewhat different tone. He describes himself as magnificently idle in class – until his genius was unfortunately unearthed by Bowyer. He was a down-at-heel ragamuffin in the cloisters, a frequenter of illegal bathing expeditions to the New River in the East End, and a voracious reader of extra-curricular books. These were obtained from a public lending library in nearby King Street, to which he had been given a ticket – so he said – by an unknown gentleman he bumped into in the Strand.

The story, told long after to Gillman, describes another of his epic daydreams: he was Leander swimming the Hellespont, and “thrusting his hands before him as in the act of swimming” he inadvertently struck the man’s pocket on the crowded pavement, and to his bewilderment was accused of pick-pocketing. Tearful denials were followed by a vivid, breathless account of his dreaming re-enactment of Leander’s adventures, all in young Coleridge’s most eloquent, large-eyed manner. The gentleman “was so struck and delighted by the novelty of the thing”, that he ended by subscribing him the library ticket.

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This odd tale, which is certainly strange enough to be true, has something curiously prophetic about it: the daydreaming poet – the sudden interruption – the accusation of (literary) theft – the hypnotic, glittering-eyed explanation. They are all emblems of the future literary man at work. The story also suggests that Coleridge was independent enough in his world of books and dreams to regularly go “skulking”, school slang for breaking bounds.