The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge. Adam Sisman
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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’.9
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.10
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 George11 – 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 1792.12
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.13) 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 … 14
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’.15 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