Coleridge: Early Visions. Richard Holmes
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in 1785, he wrote to James: “I have been thinking these some days past of getting Sam, a couple of years hence, sent out to me as Cadet at the India House. Let me know your sentiments on this scheme…”5 Thoughts of John, and Frank, far away in India were to have subtle influence on Sam’s restless dreams in the future.
Frank’s convoy had been met at Bombay by his brother John, who arranged for his transfer from the navy to the Indian army as a subaltern. Dashing and high-spirited (“the young dog is as fond of his sword as a girl is of a new lover,” wrote John approvingly), Frank was promoted to an ensign of infantry in 1784, and served with distinction for eight years, until wounded in a night-attack on Seringapatam. His commanding officer, Lord Cornwallis, presented him with a gold watch for his gallantry. But Frank contracted a fever, and shot himself in delirium soon after, dying in 1792 aged twenty-two.
Coleridge was much impressed by this romantic military career, which came to seem a reproach for his own fecklessness at Cambridge (as his mother no doubt pointed out), and later composed a fictional sketch of Frank’s upbringing in his poem “The Foster Mother’s Tale”, which ends with a haunting image of the young man’s loss in the distant “golden lands”. Characteristically, the fever and suicide is transformed into a moonlit voyage up an imaginary river. The “poor mad youth”
…seized a boat,
And all alone, set sail by silent moonlight
Up a great river, great as any sea,
And ne’er was heard of more: but ‘tis suppos’d
He liv’d and died among the savage men.6
2
Sam was accepted at Christ’s Hospital (probably through the influence of Judge Buller) for the Michaelmas term of 1782, with a six-week preliminary attendance at the preparatory school at Hertford beginning in July. If Ann Coleridge did not wish to be parted from her youngest child, there is no sign of this, for she immediately despatched him to London in April to spend the spring and summer with her brother John Bowdon. The impression that she was glad to have him off her hands is increased by the remarkable fact that he was not allowed back to Ottery, during the brief Christmas and summer vacations, more than three or possibly four times over the next nine years. Significantly, Coleridge left no memory of his parting from his mother at Ottery, except in a sonnet of 1791 when he refers rather formally to how his
weeping childhood, torn
By early sorrow from my native seat,
Mingled its tears with hers – my widow’d Parent lorn.7
Nor is there much evidence of correspondence between school and home: of his seven known schoolboy letters, only one is to his mother; another is to Luke, and the remaining five are to George, whose role as father-figure became increasingly evident.
The first three months in London with Uncle Bowdon – who kept a tobacconist’s near the Stock Exchange and was also a part-time clerk for an underwriter – were recalled with immense and comic satisfaction by Coleridge. Far from grieving for the countryside of Ottery, he revelled in his first experience of the big city, and felt his wings as a talker and social being. Bowdon was a kindly, generous man but also a drinker – “a Sot” who was “fleeced unmercifully” by his servant in the shop, and bullied at home by “an ugly and an artful” daughter. Sam accompanied him on his frequent escapes to the taverns, and had his first unforgettable taste of the great talking-shop of London, the Johnsonian world of clubs and coffee-houses, with its last echoes of the elegant, rakish Augustan society of Steele and Addison.
It was all highly unsuitable for a child of nine and a half, and pleased him no end. “My Uncle was very proud of me, & used to carry me from Coffee-house to Coffee-house, and Tavern to Tavern, where I drank, & talked & disputed, as if I had been a man –. Nothing was more common than for a large party to exclaim in my hearing, that I was aprodigy etc etc etc – so that, while I remained at my Uncle’s, I was most completely spoilt & pampered, both mind and body.”8 But this vision of forbidden, urban, adult delights – which attracted Coleridge’s gregarious nature all his life – was merely a prologue to the tribal, schoolboy horrors to come.
In July he “donned the Blue coat & yellow stockings”, and went down to the prep school at Hertford for six weeks, where he was briefly very happy – “for I had plenty to eat & drink, & pudding & vegetables almost every day”. Then, in September 1782, he was delivered up to the Under Grammar School of Christ’s Hospital, one small boy among 600, with his private world reduced to an iron bedstead in a “ward” or dormitory of fifteen others. For the next three years his existence was remembered with self-pity and righteous indignation: “Oh, what a change! depressed, moping, friendless, poor orphan, half starved”.9
These early, beastly memories of Christ’s Hospital have a familiar ring, and variations can be found in the schooldays of many English writers: Shelley, Dickens, or Kipling. The rising bell at 6 a.m.; the miserable food, consisting largely of bread, thin porridge, and bad beer – and “never any vegetables”; the heartless “Nurse” or dormitory matron, who scrubbed him with stinging sulphur ointment against ringworm; the ill-fitting clog shoes and the nauseous stench of the communal boot-room and lavatories; the flogging in the classrooms and the loneliness in the cloisters. He later indignantly told Godwin that he was treated with “contumely & brutality”, and frequently took refuge “in a sunny corner, shutting his eyes, & imagining himself at home”.10
There is however evidence that Coleridge, with his verbal fluency (despite the Devon accent which he retained all his life), and his powerful, moody temperament (sometimes utterly withdrawn, sometimes exuberantly outgoing and wild) stood up quite well to the ordeal. Despite the “excessive subordination” to senior boys required, there was little overt suggestion of bullying or homosexuality. Though it is true that in his adult dreams nightmares of Christ’s Hospital would often surface, suggesting more subtle forms of persecution, physical humiliations and, above all, profound, almost disabling homesickness. Many of these dreams would centre on the headmaster, James Bowyer, who became a dominating figure in the later part of his schooling.
Coleridge’s first known letter home, which dates from February 1785 – when he was twelve – says almost nothing of school life, but mentions a litany of Ottery friends he wishes to greet, and a careful enumeration of small presents sent to him: “two handkerchiefs and the half-a-crown from Mr. Badcock…a half-a-crown from Mrs Smerdon, but…not a word of the plumb cake…My aunt [Bowdon] was so kind as to accommodate me with a box”. It was a stiff, schoolboy performance, with only tiny glimpses of his real life and thoughts: “I suppose my sister Anna’s beauty has many admirers. My brother Luke says that Burke’s Art of Speaking would be of great use to me.” It is signed rather formally to his mother, “your dutiful son”; but has a revealing concession in its postscript: “P.S. Give my kind love to Molly.”11
3
At this period Christ’s Hospital was sharply distinguished from the great public schools such as Eton (attended by Shelley), Harrow (Byron) or Westminster (Southey), with their aristocratic connections, anarchic regimes, and in-built sense of class privileges. There were no riots, no underground magazines, no tutorial friendships between boys and masters, no freedoms outside school hours. It was a highly conservative institution, largely funded by philanthropists from the City of London, with spartan facilities and food, lengthy church attendances, and strictly practical aims for most of its pupils.
The main building, founded by Edward VI in 1552, on the site of a Franciscan friary, stood on Newgate Street close to the prison