The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge. Adam Sisman
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Cambridge, George Dyer had been an old friend of his schoolmaster William Taylor, and Holcroft had reviewed his poems (unfavourably) in the Monthly Review. Another of those present, James Losh, a Cambridge friend of Wordsworth’s, had been in Paris late in 1792, and the two of them may have met there, perhaps at the dinner of expatriate Englishmen at White’s Hotel where a toast to Tom Paine had been drunk. Losh and Wordsworth had a further connection in that both came from Cumberland.
Wordsworth called on Godwin the very next day (probably by invitation), and then again ten days later, when he was invited to breakfast. For Wordsworth, to be able to converse tête à tête with the famous philosopher made an exhilarating change from hours spent at Raisley Calvert’s bedside, unable to talk with or even read to the dying young man. During the previous year he had been spouting Godwinian ideas; now he could drink them fresh from the source. This was the time when, according to Hazlitt, Wordsworth urged a young student, ‘Throw aside your books of chemistry, and read Godwin on Necessity.’ Over the coming months Wordsworth called on Godwin a number of times, usually alone, but twice with Mathews, and on one of these occasions also with Joseph Fawcett. Godwin paid Wordsworth the compliment of calling on him too, suggesting that he valued Wordsworth’s company: further evidence, perhaps, of the favourable impression this young man made on others.
Wordsworth’s poetry written in this period shows a strong Godwinian influence. In particular, drawing on Godwin’s philosophical novel The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), he planned to rewrite his Salisbury Plain poem to show how ‘the vices of the penal law and the calamities of war’ could lead an otherwise innocent man to commit the most terrible of crimes.29
Southey bundled a protesting Coleridge onto the Bristol coach, and stood guard over him until they reached their destination. There the two founding Pantisocrats settled into cheap lodgings with George Burnett while they considered their next move. The scheme was not going to plan. There had been no further recruits, and they had not managed to raise anything like enough money to fund their emigration – barely any money at all, in fact (The Fall of Robespierre had not sold so well as hoped). Southey was now in favour of taking a farm in Wales, as a less ambitious venture. When he had first proposed this back in early December, Coleridge had dismissed it as ‘nonsense’. Now, demoralised, he accepted the revised plan.
The immediate need was to earn some money. While in London Southey had tried to interest publishers in his Wat Tyler, but all had declined for fear of prosecution. Coleridge toyed with a number of alternatives, including returning to London to work as a reporter for the Telegraph, and going to Scotland to act as tutor to the sons of the Earl of Buchan. But both of these meant abandoning Sara, and now that they were together again Coleridge found that he did not want to leave her – indeed, very much the opposite. He discovered, too, that she had attracted the attentions of two other men, one of them of large Fortune’, and that she was being pressed by her relatives to accept this suitor if Coleridge would not marry her first. Naturally this discovery increased Coleridge’s interest.
Very quickly it was decided that Coleridge should give a series of public lectures in Bristol’s Corn Market, capitalising on his qualities as an orator by charging a shilling a head in attendance money. The idea may have been inspired by the example of John Thelwall, who since his acquittal had been drawing large audiences – as many as eight hundred at a time – for his political lectures (though even so he found it hard to find a venue that would take him). Coleridge’s first lecture was written at a single sitting, under Southey’s supervision, between midnight and breakfast time of the day on which it was to be delivered. The lectures blasted Pitt’s repressive government and condemned its war against Revolutionary France, earning Coleridge a local reputation as a dangerous radical. He revelled in the notoriety: ‘Mobs and Mayors, Blockheads and Brickbats, Placards and Press gangs have leagued in horrible Conspiracy against me.’ Soon after delivering the first lecture he published this as a pamphlet, claiming he felt ‘obliged’ to do so, ‘it having been confidently asserted that there was Treason in it’. He triumphed over hecklers, and proudly announced to Dyer that he had succeeded in provoking ‘furious and determined’ opposition from ‘the Aristocrats’, to the extent of hiring thugs – ‘uncouth and unbrained Automata’ – who threatened to attack him. After the second lecture it was felt necessary to move the third to a private address – and even then a crowd gathered outside could scarcely be restrained from attacking the house on Castle Green where the ‘damn’d Jacobine was jawing away’.30
Coleridge was an amusing lecturer, and his talks were both well attended and enthusiastically received. He dealt cleverly with hecklers. On one occasion ‘some gentlemen of the opposite party’, disliking what they heard, began to hiss. Coleridge responded instantly: ‘I am not at all surprised, when the red hot prejudices of aristocrats are suddenly plunged into the cool water of reason, that they should go off with a hiss!’ His witty riposte was greeted with ‘immense applause’. There was no more hissing after that.
The lectures were crafted to appeal to the sentiments of the dissenters who formed the majority of Bristol’s radical population. Coleridge likened the People to the blinded Samson, standing between ‘those two massy Pillars of Oppression’s Temple, Monarchy and Aristocracy’; they needed guidance. While deploring revolutionary violence, he insisted on the need for reform to prevent such violence occurring. The ‘great object in which we are anxiously engaged’ was ‘to place Liberty on her seat with bloodless hands’. All this was meat and drink to Bristol’s radicals, who were further cheered by his second lecture, ‘On the Present War’, which referred to ‘the distressful stagnation of Trade and Commerce’, and its woeful effect on the poor in particular:
War ruins our Manufactures; the ruin of our Manufactures throws Thousands out of employ; men cannot starve; they must either pick their countrymen’s Pockets – or cut the throats of their fellow-creatures … If they chuse … the former, they are hung or transported to Botany Bay. And here we cannot but admire the deep and comprehensive Views of our Ministers, who having starved the wretch into Vice send him to the barren shores of New Holland to be starved back again into Virtue.
Soon afterwards, Southey began delivering a course of twelve historical lectures on the background to the French Revolution. Each lecturer helped the other; it was a joint endeavour in suitably Pantisocratic style. ‘We live together and write together,’ Southey reported happily. ‘Coleridge is writing at the same table; our names are written in the book of destiny, on the same page.’31
In London Coleridge had tried to place a volume of his poems, but most of the booksellers would not even look at them, and the only offer he received was a derisory six guineas. Here in Bristol, Cottle generously offered him thirty guineas, to be paid in advance as required. ‘The silence and the grasped hand, showed that at that moment one person was happy.’32 Coleridge began collecting his poems and composing new ones for a volume to appear later in the year. Southey was still completing his long historical epic Joan of Arc, to which Coleridge contributed 255 lines and ‘corrected’ the rest. Cottle commissioned handsome portraits of both young authors by Peter Vandyke, a supposed descendant of the Flemish master.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the popularity of Coleridge’s lectures, he was ‘soon obliged by the persecutions of Darkness to discontinue them’.33 Undeterred, a group of prominent Bristol dissenters commissioned him to deliver a fresh course of six lectures on revealed religion at the Assembly coffee house on the Quay.34 Drawing on the ideas of Unitarian thinkers such as Frend and Priestley, Coleridge denounced the corruption of the Church of England. He ridiculed the dogma of the Trinity, and rejected the doctrine of the Redemption. For Coleridge, the teaching of Jesus Christ called for the complete abolition of private property – a measure too extreme for even the wildest Jacobins.* Indeed, passages from his sixth and final lecture sound like a manifesto for Pantisocracy: