Coleridge: Early Visions. Richard Holmes
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saw the beginnings of his own metaphysical interests even at the age of eight. He felt that his mind was naturally formed to a religious, mystical conception of the world, always reaching towards a sense of infinity and unity within the creation. Once again he was interpreting his childhood along Romantic lines, opposed to the whole analytic and rational tradition of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment education. It is interesting to compare this with John Stuart Mill’s criticism of his own strictly utilitarian upbringing in his Autobiography (1873).
Coleridge put this to Tom Poole with what was, at twenty-five, glowing confidence in his own powers.
I regulated all my creeds by my conceptions not by my sight – even at that age. Should children be permitted to read Romances, & Relations of Giants & Magicians, & Genii? – I know all that has been said against it; but I have formed my faith in the affirmative. I know no other way of giving the mind a love of “the Great”, & “the Whole”…I have known some who have been rationally educated, as it is styled. They were marked by a microscopic acuteness; but when they looked at great things, all became a blank & they saw nothing…and uniformly put the negation of a power for the possession of a power – & called the want of imagination, Judgment, & the never being moved to Rapture Philosophy!50
That childlike sense of reverence and wonder remained with him, almost miraculously, far into middle age.
Despite such lyrical recollections as this, it is hard to decide how happy Sam really was at Ottery. There are no more than fleeting references to him in his brothers’ letters, and Coleridge’s own evidence is curiously contradictory. Against the golden memories of his father’s kindness, there are the tight-lipped references to his mother, and (in later letters to George) the forlorn recollections of his brothers’ lack of interest. In 1804 he would write with sudden vehemence, “I was hardly used from infancy to Boyhood; & from Boyhood to Youth most, MOST cruelly,” but this was at a time of general discouragement, and self-pity.51
In his poetry, the picture is consistently magical and dreaming, but this was part of the carefully orchestrated Romantic myth. It has to be set against the equally vivid account of the night-escape to the Otter, which might almost suggest a disturbed child. The desire to perform, to please, to claim attention, to impress his elders, is certainly very evident; and this he would carry into later life. With it came those entrancing natural powers of talk and charm which never left him. It was a charismatic gift, coupled with the effect of his extraordinary eyes, almost like that of an actor or an old-fashioned mountebank. It was confirmed by all who met him (whether approving or not), and eventually put to work professionally in a long public career as lay preacher, popular lecturer, society talker, improvisatore, and philosophical sage or guru. Yet against this, the solitariness of his imaginative life, with its obsessional reading, its dream-haunted inner world, its terrors and self-doubts, also established itself in these earliest days.* One of the saddest, and yet most ironic, reflections he ever made on these first years – coming from the great champion of innocent Romantic childhood – was given with a sigh to Gillman: “Alas! I had all the simplicity, all the docility of the little child, but none of the child’s habits. I never thought as a child, never had the language of a child.”52
1
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.1
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”.2 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.3 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.”4
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 –