Coleridge: Early Visions. Richard Holmes
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surprised by Coleridge’s “unexpected arrival”, and spent the next ten days introducing him to his circle of friends in the city.24
News of Pantisocracy quickly spread through Bristol, where Southey, Lovell and Coleridge (two Oxons and one Cantab) were regarded as the three moving spirits of the enterprise. Coleridge met Joseph Cottle, a young Unitarian publisher who was already printing Southey’s Joan of Arc, and who immediately offered to publish anything by Coleridge. “I instantly descried his intellectual character,” wrote Cottle, “exhibiting as he did, an eye, a brow, and a forehead, indicative of commanding genius. Interviews succeeded and these increased the impression of respect.”25 Cottle gained the impression, from the fervour of the three, that they were considering taking ship for America from Bristol at any moment, and considered it as a noble but “epidemic delusion”. This was an important introduction, and Cottle would become Coleridge’s first publisher in 1796.
Southey and Lovell also introduced Coleridge to the Fricker family. They were a household of five, high-spirited, dashing girls, whose widowed mother kept a dress shop in Bristol. (There was also a son, George Fricker, who was always getting into scrapes.) Robert Lovell had just married the second daughter, Mary, who had worked as an actress; and Southey was courting the third, Edith, who was generally regarded as the sweetest-natured of the Frickers, and who worked as a milliner.
Of the remaining two of marriageable age (little Eliza was still a schoolgirl), Sara Fricker, the eldest then twenty-four, was thought to be the most handsome and hot-tempered; and Martha Fricker the most wayward and amusing. Among the Pantisocrats, George Burnett – then living in Somerset – had expressed interest in Martha, and would propose to her later that autumn. (She turned him down.) By simple mathematics, that left Sara and Coleridge, though temperamentally they were the most wildly unsuited of the couples.
Under normal circumstances it would be difficult to imagine anything more than a brief, summer holiday flirtation taking place. But circumstances were not normal, for several reasons. In the first place, the entire Fricker family was also caught up in the Pantisocratic whirlwind, and as Coleridge later observed mournfully, it was easy to mistake “the ebullience of schematism for affection, which a moment’s reflection might have told me, is not a plant of so mushroom a growth”.26
In the second place, Coleridge’s encounter with Mary Evans at Wrexham had reminded him how avidly he craved affection, and of the lost joys of the Evans family household. The Fricker family seemed to offer an instant and almost miraculous substitute. He was – in the old phrase, which seems particularly suited to Coleridge – on the rebound, and feeling increasingly isolated from his own people at Ottery. Moreover, Southey was now aware of this volatility, as later events that autumn showed. He felt a moral duty to help Coleridge put his emotions in proper order. An alliance with Sara seemed the logical answer, which fitted so beautifully into all their plans.
Southey’s own position was curiously ambiguous. There is evidence that his own attentions had first been paid to Sara until, finding her too demanding, he had turned to the more docile Edith.27 He always retained great fondness for Sara (as life at Keswick later showed), and there may well have been some element of soothing his own guilty conscience in the brotherly rigour with which he soon pressed her suit with Coleridge.
Finally, there can be little doubt that there was considerable sexual attraction on both sides. Coleridge was generally acknowledged as the most brilliant of the Pantisocrats, a Cambridge scholar with a possibly dazzling future, which greatly appealed to the high-strung and ambitious Sara, who loved his jokes, his dark hair, and large wild eyes. While Coleridge, always susceptible to female beauty, must easily have fallen for Sara’s bright animated face, her bubbling ringlets of brown hair, her quick teasing wit and generous, carefully laced figure turned out in the latest dress-shop fashions.
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Coleridge and Southey now had much to talk about between themselves, and on 14 August they left Bristol together, on a further walking tour through Somerset to see George Burnett at Huntspill, and work out further Pantisocratic details. Accompanied by Southey’s enthusiastic dog Rover (also a Pantisocrat), they climbed the Mendip Hills, visited the towering red cliffs and echoing caverns of Cheddar Gorge – and made their way to Bridgwater at the foot of the Quantocks.28
They were in wild spirits. At the Cheddar Inn, the landlady insisted on locking them all into the garret room for the night (including Rover), fearing they were footpads. They slept in the same bed, and Southey – with a revealing touch of physical distaste – found Coleridge to be “a vile bedfellow”, much disturbed by dreams.29 At Chilcompton, Coleridge dashed off a thirty-two-line poem about the village stream, describing the small boys sailing paper navies on its “milky waters cold and clear”, which greatly impressed Southey.30
At Nether Stowey, they called in to introduce themselves to the family of Thomas Poole, the young owner of the local tannery who was well-known in Bristol for his democratic views. News of the death of Robespierre in Paris (28 July) had just reached the village, and provoked animated discussion, during which Southey dramatically announced that he had rather have heard of the death of his own father.31 This might have lost some of its impact had anyone realised that Southey’s father was already dead.
Poole’s cousin, John, was shocked by their behaviour and recorded in his Latin diary for 18 August: “About one o’clock, Thomas Poole…and two young men, friends of his, come in. One is an undergraduate of Oxford, the other of Cambridge. Each of them was shamefully hot with Democratic Rage as regards politics, and both Infidel as to religion. I was extremely indignant.”32 But Tom Poole himself was greatly excited by the Pantisocratic scheme, and was particularly impressed by Coleridge, without taking his wild talk entirely seriously. In the course of a few hours, another fast friendship was formed which would endure for many years, and which again shows Coleridge’s almost hypnotic effect on new acquaintances.
Tom Poole was then twenty-eight years old, a bachelor, much attached to his invalid and widowed mother. He had been born in Stowey, and given a practical education to prepare him for the lucrative business of the local tannery which he inherited from his father. Quiet, thoughtful, and widely read, he early dedicated himself to liberal causes and philanthropy. He founded the Stowey Book Club, which circulated the works of Paine, Franklin, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Later, in 1817, he founded the first Stowey Co-operative Bank. He followed the events of the French Revolution closely, and often dreamed of emigrating to America. In 1790 he was the youngest delegate from the West of England to the Tanners’ Conference in London, and was elected to interview Prime Minister Pitt for the conference the following year. In the summer of 1793, he dressed himself as a common workman and travelled through the Midlands to discover the conditions of working people for himself. It was said that he first heard of Coleridge in the dragoons, while at the Reading Fair at the end of that year.
From a very different class background, he shared a political idealism close to Coleridge, and was constantly criticised by his relatives for his extreme views. He fell in love with one of his cousins at Over Stowey, but she always refused him for this reason. A self-made and self-educated man, he had the highest respect for literature and science, and collected a library at Stowey in a special upstairs Book Parlour, which later attracted not only Coleridge, but also Wordsworth and Humphry Davy. Almost naively fascinated by those he regarded as men of intellectual genius, his letters show him as earnest, sententious, slightly humourless and yet resolutely down-to-earth. In appearance he was short and stocky (the perfect yeoman farmer, said De Quincey), with prematurely balding hair and slow, deliberate Somersetshire speech: one of nature’s favourite uncles.
Poole’s