Coleridge

Katharine Cooke

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317205418
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1979, this book provides thorough a guide through Coleridge's diverse body of work, looking not just his poetry but also his literary criticism and theories, plays, political journalism and theory, and writings on religion and philosophy. The author is careful to avoid emphasising one aspect of his work over another and consequently the whole emerges as a richer, more complete body of thought — less esoteric and more concerned with the world. It challenges the notion of the 'damaged archangel', showing he was a successful playwright, long-standing contributor to one of the foremost papers of the day and a literary figure of note in touch with leading thinkers and writers.

1 Life

DOI: 10.4324/9781315616599-2

He has been treated sufficiently often as a human contradiction and as a biographer’s puzzle. He has been pitied and patronized, condemned and defended enough. The literature on his ‘case’ must be now nearly as voluminous as his own writings.¹

That was over forty years ago; but the picture has altered little, although the accumulation of studies is now considerably greater. D. P. Calleo summed up the position tersely: ‘No man ever had more condescending biographers.’² It is wonderfully easy to ‘tut-tut’ at Coleridge. It was done in his lifetime and has been done ever since. He should not have married Sara Fricker, he should not have left her; he should not have become addicted to opium; he should not have become so involved with Wordsworth, much less with Sara Hutchinson; he ought not to have deceived his friends, borrowed from the writings of others, wallowed in ill-health, wasted so much time on abstruse books – the list of charges could go on. But to say all this is to say that he should not have been Coleridge. Nor, if a moral tone is to be adopted, can Coleridge’s shortcomings be considered as really vicious; after all, he did not father and abandon an illegitimate daughter as did Wordsworth, he did not divorce his wife to marry a common maid who would not have him, as did Hazlitt, and his sins do not bear mention beside those of Byron and Shelley. Yet these men are recognised rightly for what they are, without irrelevant moral opprobrium. The answer cannot be that Coleridge setting great store in his work by a moral life is found wanting by his own standards (though he would have been the first to admit the truth of this), because Wordsworth even more set himself up as a figure of moral rectitude. Coleridge’s trouble is that he is so open about his faults and failures. It is all there for the prying eyes of posterity; his bowels, his skin complaints, his prescriptions for cures, his sufferings and his longings, all this as well as, on the lighter side, his recipes for ginger beer, his walking holidays, his recommendations for his children’s diet, make Coleridge an intimate acquaintance. When in addition he records his sense of guilt and failure, it is difficult to resist the temptation to feel an easy superiority.

Coleridge’s life was not an extraordinarily eventful one, but to all his life’s events he responded in full. He was, too, alive in eventful times, and these affairs of the world at large had an influence on him which cannot be overlooked. All this makes a survey of his life in one chapter a difficult task. I have tried here to give an outline, referring the reader, where appropriate, to more detailed coverage in later chapters. The narrative has been interrupted from time to time to discuss various aspects of Coleridge’s life which seem to warrant separate treatment. I have tried not to judge and to keep comment to a minimum, and there is no attempt to delve into Coleridge’s personality – that, in the only way in which it concerns us, should emerge from the study of his writings in later chapters. Coleridge’s life and character had such an influence on his work that it is difficult to discuss one apart from the other, and references perhaps not easily understandable at this stage have been inevitable. On the other hand, reading the rest of the book should help to fill out the picture of Coleridge which is only sketched here.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on 21 October 1772 (he always thought his birthday was on the 20th). His childhood, in the small country town of Ottery St Mary where his father was schoolmaster, seems to have been uneventful enough. As the youngest of ten children, nine of them boys, he remembered being spoilt by both mother and father and being the object of his brothers’ jealousy, as might be expected in the youngest of such a large brood. One incident Coleridge recounts in detail is his running away from home. This followed a scrap with his brother Francis, the next youngest, over a piece of cheese and resulted in Samuel’s staying all night in the open. A great to-do was the result of this incident when it happened and critics since have explored the happening for seeds of Coleridge’s future problems.³ Coleridge himself laconically observed:⁴

I was put to bed – & recovered in a day or so – but I was certainly injured – For I was weakly, & subject to the ague for many years after –

It seems likely that a tendency to rheumatic pains (and possibly to hypochondria) date from this incident.

Coleridge’s childhood was abruptly and prematurely ended by his father’s death in 1781. His family was obliged to leave the school-house and in the spring of 1782 arrangements were made for Coleridge to attend Christ’s Hospital School. From this time until he enjoyed the different freedom of Cambridge undergraduate life, Coleridge lost the carefree ways of a country upbringing. Coleridge has many harsh things to say of his schooldays: ‘our diet was very scanty’, ‘The boys were … under excessive subordination to each other’.⁵ The picture in ‘Frost at Midnight’ has been thought to owe something to Wordsworth’s belief in the value of nature, when it recalls:⁶

I was reared

In the great city, pent ’mid cloisters dim

And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.

but the word ‘pent’ probably reflects accurately the feelings of the young Coleridge in the restricted atmosphere of his school. Certain free days were allowed, but Coleridge had few connections in London until, towards the end of his schooldays, he was befriended by the Evans family and treated as one of their own. The combination of being adrift from the large society of Ottery, where he could count on being known and respected as his father’s son, and the sense of being restricted by high walls and rigid discipline in a city school probably accounts for Coleridge’s unhappiness at school. Intellectually, he seems to have been more fortunate; the ‘very sensible, though at the same time, … very severe master’,⁷ the Reverend James Bowyer encouraged Coleridge’s interest in literature. This was an interest which Coleridge had developed in his solitary hours at home and his schoolmasters deepened his knowledge not only of the classics but also of the great English writers, notably Milton and Shakespeare. He seems at this time also to have begun to take an interest in metaphysics, profiting from the city’s library resources to explore works of philosophy, so that Charles Lamb, a year or two younger than Coleridge, was highly impressed by his fluent learning.⁸

Altogether, it was not the stable childhood that would foster emotional self-sufficiency or self-confidence even in someone less easily influenced by life’s vicissitudes than Coleridge. It is hardly surprising that troubles should throng quickly upon him when he was installed at Cambridge. His arrival at Jesus College in October 1791 was unfortunate (some confusion caused him to be penniless and without permanent rooms) and he was lonely:⁹

I sit down to dinner in the Hall in silence – except the noise of suction, which accompanies my eating – and rise-up ditto.

In his next letter he remarks: ‘There is no such thing as discipline at our college’¹⁰ and it was not long before Coleridge, without the support of an organised routine displayed his incapacity for self-discipline. Rheumatism and opium are an ominous conjunction but at first, Coleridge’s problems were primarily financial. Nearly thirty years later Coleridge wrote to his son, Derwent, as he entered his Cambridge career, not to incur:¹¹

any Cambridge Debt – the very thought of which agitates me, who can never forget the stupifying effect of my first Term Bill … affected and infected my whole life following –

He was at this time in close correspondence with the Evans family and this recourse to old London friends suggests a loneliness at Cambridge which he was unable to alleviate by ordinary undergraduate friendships. Oxford and Cambridge in those days were not primarily educational establishments but a step on the road from country society to ordination, thence back to country life. Those whose roots were unthinkingly established in this system, as for instance Parson Woodforde,¹² adjusted well to the lax discipline, excessive consumption of food and drink and leisurely study. Coleridge was not of that type (nor was Wordsworth, who could not settle at Cambridge either); he was an orphan and a scholar whose mind had already been opened to worlds beyond the ken of country parsons’ sons. At this time rejecting his own background in the established church, Coleridge entered into the political life of the university under the influence of William Frend, a Unitarian and supporter of the French Revolution whose following among undergraduates was frowned upon by his fellow dons.

This introduction to Unitarianism was to have important consequences for Coleridge. Unitarian circles at this time offered an opportunity for sociable study which must have been very attractive to Coleridge. The atmosphere of a small group of dissenters banded together in the face of general social opprobrium had the added advantage of being open to intellectual enquiry. The desire to justify their own view of Christianity led Unitarians to the study of philosophy as well as of Bible criticism. E. S. Shaffer¹³ suggests that it was through Unitarian contacts both at Bristol and at Cambridge that Coleridge first became interested in German thinkers, and undoubtedly the Unitarian influence fostered his interest in David Hartley. Unitarianism had a political dimension too. The storming of the Bastille while Coleridge was at school had been welcomed in England as a manifestation of the spirit of freedom. Later, fears for British institutions led the establishment in England to repressive measures; unorthodoxy of thought was suspect, meetings were watched and restrictive legislation was brought in. Dissenters in England who had not wavered in their support of revolutionary ideals were now stimulated by oppression to oppose the government. Hartley’s ‘necessarianism’, especially as it was espoused by the prominent Unitarian, Priestley, formed an important part of Unitarian political thinking. Man, who had little control over his own destiny, was capable of the greatest good if only his environment were made more favourable. In political terms, this emerged in Coleridge’s Bristol lectures, for instance, as an indictment of a war-mongering government exploiting the poverty of the people. Necessarianism could not for long satisfy Coleridge, who seems always to have felt a repugnance for any theology or philosophy which denied him some hand in his own fate. The neo-platonists whom he had read at school and whom he further studied at Cambridge soon began to modify his necessarianism. The evolution of Coleridge’s thought was slow but steady from this time forward, and it involved him in a critical appraisal of many of his fellow thinkers. Hartley was in the ascendent still when his first son was born in 1796, but by 1798 he was to have changed sufficiently to name his second son for Berkeley, the platonist Anglican Bishop. Some ten years later Southey was to report on Coleridge’s progress:¹⁴

Hartley was ousted by Berkeley, Berkeley by Spinoza, & Spinoza by Plato. When last I saw him Jacob Behmen had some chance of coming in.

Not until after this did Coleridge really develop his own thought fully, demonstrating how he had used his earlier reading to enrich his understanding of his own mind and experience. The Biographia is the mature fruit of his study and in that book the reaction against Hartley is best studied. Godwin, although he never had the same influence over Coleridge as Hartley, deserves a mention here. The reason why Coleridge never fell under Godwin’s sway was that he could not accept the older man’s rejection of emotion. His reaction to this aspect of Godwinianism provided an important impetus in the early political prose and in the poetry.

At Cambridge Coleridge’s reading seems to have been unorthodox and spasmodic, his studying pursued in fits and starts, his way of life most irregular. Coleridge wrote a confessional letter to his brother:¹⁵

My Affairs became more and more involved – I fled to Debauchery – fled from the silent and solitary Anguish to all the uproar of senseless Mirth! Having, or imagining that I had, no stock of Happiness, to which I could look forwards, I seized the empty gratifications of the moment, and snatched at the Foam as the Wave passed by me. – I feel a painful blush on my cheek, while I write it – but even for the University Scholarship, for which I affected to have read so severely, I did not read three days uninterruptedly – for the whole six weeks, that preceded the examination, I was almost constantly intoxicated!

Desperate remedies were sought: Coleridge enlisted in the Dragoons. He took a pseudonym, Silas Tomkyn Comberbache, but it seems very likely that he was not sorry to be recognised by an old school acquaintance who made his plight known. Recriminations and profound apologies over, Coleridge was returned to Cambridge, though with only a meagre supply of funds. By June 1794 Coleridge’s spirits were sufficiently recovered for a walking tour of Wales with a fellow undergraduate. The first major stop was at Oxford, where Coleridge was introduced to Southey, and the first of an important series of friendships was begun. Southey too was an impecunious orphan, and his expulsion for disruptive behaviour from Westminster School seemed to indicate a fellow non-conformist, but in the summer when Habeas Corpus was suspended and prominent English radicals like Home Tooke, Thelwall and Hardy were arrested, it was political sympathy which carried the two men into a friendship which was to last in spite of fundamental differences in character, reflected in several prolonged quarrels, until Coleridge’s death.

This raises two issues which need further comment. One is the impact of the French Revolution on Coleridge’s developing thought, and for a detailed discussion of this the reader should consult the chapters on Coleridge’s political writing. The other is the importance throughout Coleridge’s life of a succession of friendships. This is not an easy subject to discuss briefly,¹⁶ and the strength of friendships with Southey, Wordsworth, Poole and finally the Gillmans as well as lesser but equally revealing friendships with Cottle, Humphry Davy, Morgan, Allsop and Green among others does not emerge clearly from the story of his life. After all, other men have friends and quarrel with them; but in Coleridge’s case there was something more. Students of Coleridge with psychiatric training have seen in these relationships a reflection of Coleridge’s inadequate relations with his parents, and it seems fairly obvious that in these friendships Coleridge was trying to create a bond like that of family between himself and men who showed themselves sympathetic to his position. The friendship with Wordsworth is something of a special case, on account of its importance to the development of the genius of both writers, but the friendship with Southey, begun only three months after his humiliating return to Cambridge, may perhaps serve as an illustration of some of the common features of these friendships. After three weeks stay at Oxford, Coleridge was writing to Southey:¹⁷

When the pure System of Pantocracy shall have aspheterized the Bounties of Nature, these things will not be so – ! I trust, you admire the word ‘aspheterized’ from a non, σϕέτεος proprius! We really wanted such a word – instead of travelling across the circuitous, dusty, beaten high-Road of Diction you thus cut across the soft, green pathless Field of Novelty!–

The enthusiasm displayed in a Coleridgean love of new words and word play is evident, a hall-mark of Coleridge’s friendships in their early stages. That Southey and Coleridge should, on such a slight acquaintance, embark on an ambitious scheme like Pantisocracy (as it was later called) is typical of the way in which this friendship set alight the ideals of the two young men. The plan was that Southey, Coleridge and a few well-chosen friends should emigrate to start a colony where all property and all labour would be shared. A few months later, in Bristol, the plan was enlarged to include a number of women – notably, the three Fricker sisters, Edith, who was to marry Southey, Mary, the wife of Robert Lovell, already a Pantisocrat, and Sara, who was to marry Coleridge. The women were to help with the children, the washing and cooking; the men were to till the fields and study in the evening. As the plan developed, the practicalities of the scheme caused bitter disagreement between the friends, but at first all was unalloyed enthusiasm. Partly to raise funds for the scheme, The Fall of Robespierre was published in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Life
• 2 Plays
• 3 Poetry
• 4 Literary Criticism
• 5 Political Journalism
• 6 Political Theory
• 7 On Religion
• 8 Philosophical Writings
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index