The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge. Adam Sisman
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to crumple myself up in a sunny corner and read, read, read.’ When an older schoolboy gave him a volume of William Lisle Bowles’s evocative and melancholy sonnets, Coleridge was so entranced that he painstakingly wrote out forty copies for distribution to friends. Bowles’s verse became a model for his own work, and Bowles himself a master whom the young Coleridge revered. When he later happened to see Bowles crossing the marketplace in Salisbury, Coleridge was too shy to speak to him.
Every schoolboy of this era was expected to write verse, both for its own sake and as an exercise in the study of Latin and Greek, translating classical originals into English. Coleridge’s early poetry was conventional stuff. It followed the classical models predominant in eighteenth-century verse, written in a convoluted ‘poetic’ diction that would soon come to be seen as artificial, characterised by elaborate abstractions far removed from everyday experience. The effect was strained, even turgid. Tired metaphors and phrases clogged up the lines. There was an excess of ornamentation, with too many double epithets. Bowyer tried to counter this tendency, to instil a bias towards the plainest form of words. He had a list of forbidden introductions, similes and expressions. ‘Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, Muse? Your Nurse’s daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? Oh, aye the cloister-pump, I suppose!’
One of Coleridge’s earliest poems was his ‘Monody on the Death of Chatterton’. Like Coleridge, Thomas Chatterton had been a blue-coat boy, the orphaned son of a Bristol schoolmaster, a precocious poet who at the age of sixteen claimed to have discovered a chestful of poems, letters and other documents written by a fifteenth-century monk, Thomas Rowley. Though these aroused interest and indeed excitement, Chatterton failed to prosper by them, and at the age of only eighteen, alone in a London garret, he committed suicide, driven by poverty to despair. The tragic story of neglected genius cut off at such an early age caught the imagination of young men everywhere, and Coleridge was one of many who identified powerfully with him, ominously heading his poem ‘A Monody on Chatterton, who poisoned himself at the age of eighteen – written by the author at the age of sixteen’.
In his last year at school Coleridge was confined for long months to the Christ’s Hospital sanatorium, lying in bed while hearing the boys outside laugh and play. He had become seriously ill after swimming fully clothed in the nearby New River, and afterwards wearing his wet clothes as they slowly dried on his back. Unsurprisingly he developed a fever, complicated by jaundice, no doubt as a result of the foul water in which he had immersed himself. His friend and first biographer James Gillman believed that all his future bodily sufferings could be dated from this episode.* Coleridge was a young man of enormous energy and robust vitality, yet he succumbed to recurrent attacks of illness. There was also a lasting psychological effect of this long period of convalescence. In the school sanatorium his nurse’s daughter, Jenny Edwards, helped to care for him, and he developed sentimental feelings for her; as he recovered he wrote a sonnet in her honour – which adds piquancy to Bowyer’s reported jibe about his ‘Muse’:
Fair as the bosom of the Swan
That rises graceful o’er the wave,
I’ve seen thy breast with pity heave,
And therefore love I thee, sweet Genevieve!
Forever after, Coleridge would derive a perverse erotic satisfaction from being helpless in the care of a desirable woman.
While ill he was regularly dosed with laudanum,* then prescribed as a panacea. Not only did opium relieve pain; it prompted delicious dreams that soothed the mind of the fevered boy. In future he was to resort to its use whenever he felt ill, or under pressure.
During his last year at Christ’s Hospital, Coleridge received news that his ‘sweet sister’ had died of consumption. By this time four of his brothers were already dead. Four remained, three of them much older than him. Frank (the nearest in age) had already gone away to sea, and subsequently joined the army in India. A year later he too would be dead, after receiving a wound during the siege of Seringapatam. This left the young Coleridge isolated, with no siblings near to him in age – but he found a surrogate family in the widowed mother and three sisters of a schoolmate, Tom Evans. They lived in Villiers Street, not far from the school, and Coleridge spent his Saturdays there. The Evans women provided substitute sisters and a substitute mother, whom he hoped would love him and be amused by his antics. By the time he left for Cambridge he believed himself in love with the eldest girl, Mary, though he was too shy to declare himself. Instead he wrote them all (including the mother) jokey, flirtatious letters. After his first university term he returned to them for Christmas in a poor state of health, and Mrs Evans nursed him tenderly. ‘Believe me, that You and my Sisters have the very first row in the front box of my Heart’s little theatre,’ he wrote to her afterwards, ‘and – God knows! you are not crowded.’17
In his first year at Cambridge Coleridge distinguished himself by winning a prize for a Greek ode on the then topical subject of the slave trade.* At the end of 1792 he narrowly failed to win a university scholarship, reaching the shortlist of four. Perhaps it was not surprising that he failed, given that for the six weeks preceding the examination – so he later said – he was almost constantly intoxicated. By this time he had acquired a reputation within Cambridge for his excellent classical scholarship, poetical language, and ‘a peculiar style of conversation’ – perhaps a euphemism, since Coleridge was always more inclined to talk than to listen.18 ‘He was very studious,’ recalled Valentine Le Grice, ‘but his reading was desultory and capricious.’19 Coleridge himself claimed to have been ‘a proverb to the University for Idleness’.20
He was also hopeless with money. Perhaps this judgement is harsh, because he never had a lot to spend, and was disappointed by his failure to win a scholarship. An annual income of almost £100 from a Christ’s Hospital exhibition and two university awards, together with the odd handout from his brothers, should have been enough to keep him, however. But he seemed incapable of living within his means. On his arrival at Cambridge he rashly gave an upholsterer carte blanche to redecorate his rooms, and was then ‘stupefied’ by the size of the bill. Soon he was drinking heavily, and he seems to have resumed taking opium, ‘building magnificent edifices of happiness on some fleeting shadow of reality’ in ‘soul-enervating reveries’. He often stole away to London, where there were plenty of temptations to empty his purse. Early in 1793 he wrote to his brother George summarising the state of his finances. He outlined his plans for a book of translations of ‘the best Lyric poems from the Greek, and the modern Latin writers’ – the first of many unrealised schemes. By raising two hundred subscriptions to this work, he felt that he would be able to pay off his debts, ‘which have corroded my Spirits greatly for some time Past’. He reckoned them at £58. Though George sent him some money, he was soon behind again. By the end of his second year at Cambridge he had somehow managed to run up further debts, which he now calculated, with misleading precision, at £148.17s.1¼d. He returned to Devon and presented himself before his older brothers with some trepidation. ‘I am fearful, that your Silence proceeds from Displeasure – If so, what is left for me to do – but to grieve? The Past is not in my Power – for the follies, of which I may have been guilty, I have been greatly disquieted – and I trust, the Memory of them will operate to future consistency of Conduct.’21
Coleridge’s brothers provided him with a sum to stave off his creditors, but he quickly frittered away much of this, loitering ten days in Tiverton to conduct a flirtation with Miss Fanny Nesbitt, ‘a very pretty girl’ he met on the coach. Rather than returning directly to Cambridge, he lingered in London in order to be near Mary Evans. While walking between a tavern and a shop where he went to purchase a lottery ticket, he composed a poem, ‘To Fortune’, which was published