Sara Coleridge

Her Life and Thought

J. Barbeau

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781349459131
  9781137324979
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137430854
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Letteratura generale

Known as the daughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sara Coleridge's manuscripts, letters, and other writings reveal an original thinker in dialogue with major literary and cultural figures of nineteenth-century England. Here, her writings on beauty, education, and faith uncover aspects of Romantic and Victorian literature, philosophy, and theology.

C H A P T E R 1

BEAUTY

My father has entered his marriage with my mother, and the births of my three brothers with some particularity in a family Bible, given him, as he also notes, by Joseph Cottle on his marriage; the entry of my birth is in my dear Mother’s hand-writing, and this seems like an omen of our life-long separation; for I never lived with him for more than a few weeks at a time. He lived not much more, indeed, with his other children, but most of their infancy passed under his eye. Alas! more than any of them I inherited that uneasy health of his, which kept us apart.

—Sara Coleridge (SCAB 249)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was absent for the birth of his first and only daughter on December 23, 1802.¹ He first learned of his wife’s safe delivery of the child from the Wordsworths (CN 1:1310n). His presence in body, some nine months earlier, masks the complete absence of his heart and mind from the event that produced the single-most important individual in the preservation of his legacy as one of the great intellectuals in English history. STC’s letter to Sara Hutchinson (the extramarital obsession who received far more of his affection than Sara’s mother ever knew), dated “April 4, 1802—Sunday Evening,” reveals the utterly broken state of his marriage at the time. Whether the letter was ever sent or not, the lines of “A Letter to ——,” the earliest draft of “Dejection: An Ode,” cast a dark shadow on the conception and birth of Sara Coleridge:

But thou, dear Sara! (dear indeed thou art,

My Comforter! A Heart within my Heart!) . . .

My little Children are a Joy, a Love,

A good Gift from above! . . .

There have been hours, when feeling how they bind

And pluck out the Wing-feathers of my Mind,

Turning my Error to Necessity,

I have half-wish’d, they never had been born!²

S. T. Coleridge’s obsession with Sara Hutchinson is well known. In 1808, he confided to his notebook: “Ο ΣΑΡΑ! Ο ΣΑΡΑ! What have you done in deceiving him who for 10 years did so love you as never woman was beloved! in body, in soul, in brain, in heart, in hope, in fear, in prospect, in retrospect—!” (CN 3:3303). Years later, Sara described her father’s paramour in far less flattering terms: Miss Hutchinson was “a plump woman of little more than five foot” with a figure “dumpy & devoid of grace & dignity” (SCAB 262). However one assesses Sara Hutchinson’s relationship with STC, one thing is certain: his affections were far from home when his only daughter was conceived. Nevertheless, nine months after her father “half-wish’d” he had never had any children, Sara Coleridge was born.

The birth of a daughter was a joyful event, but unexpected. Her father’s reaction to the announcement was one of disbelief: “GIRL! I had never thought of a Girl as a possible event—the word[s] child & man child were perfect Synonimes in my feelings—however I bore the sex with great Fortitude” (CL 2:902). Her mother, by contrast, was undoubtedly pleased with the thought of a girl, and while she must have been happy that her restless husband managed to return to Keswick so soon after the birth, she was surely concerned when he once again left the Lake District only a month later. Just three years earlier, Sarah (Fricker) Coleridge endured the death of her 11-month-old child, Berkeley Coleridge, alone. She recorded the event in a 1799 poem, later transcribed in her own hand in her daughter’s “Book of Mourning”:

Samuel, thy dire forebodings are fulfilled;

Death’s clay-cold hand our beauteous boy hast chilled;

Ah where art thou, unconscious father, where!

Whilst thy poor Sara weeps in sad despair?³

For her mother, the birth of a daughter was a gift; a balm to soothe her loneliness. Abandoned by STC, the two women lived together for more than 40 years.

Sara and her mother also shared an unwavering faith in STC. Hardly a negative word was ever spoken of Sara’s father growing up. In Sara’s commonplace book, her mother transcribed a letter from STC to his old Nether Stowey friend Tom Poole describing the ten-month-old child: “My meek little Sara is a remarkably interesting Baby; with the fairest possible skin, & large blue eyes—& she smiles as if she were basking in a sunshine, as mild as moonlight, of her own quiet happiness!”⁴ The entry served as a reminder from mother to daughter that the girl’s father had known her, shown pride in her, and was once present in her life. The transcription leaves out the subsequent lines: “Mrs. Coleridge enjoys her old state of excellent Health. We go on, as usual—except that tho’ I do not love her a bit better, I quarrel with her much less. We cannot be said to live at all as Husband & Wife / but we are peaceable Housemates” (CL 2:1015). STC eventually moved away from Keswick. He traveled, worked in Malta, and, finally, settled in London. Years later, Sara defended her father’s absence to her own husband, even as she recognized the dashed hopes her mother continually endured: “For years I can well remember my mother partly expecting his return . . . And even when I was at Highgate after our engagement he talked of living with my mother as a thing that might be after my marriage, & said that he had purposed a reunion . . . but I believe there was little feasibility in the scheme at that time.”⁵ Sara excused her father’s absence to Henry on the grounds of “incompatibility,” noting that “the kind of wife to have lived harmoniously with my father need not have possessed high vitality or a perfect temper;—but greater enthusiasm of temperament than my mother possessed.”⁶ Moreover, Sara remained steadfast in her belief that her father did all he could to financially support his family. When rumors of her father’s neglect of the family arose in the years after his death, Sara worked to rehabilitate his legacy. In a letter to Joseph Henry Green, one of her father’s closest associates in the last decade of his life, Sara explained that

Hazlitt’s saying about my father’s want of will may represent a truth, or may be cited to support a cruel untruth. My poor father never left his family to be wholly supported by others, as has been too often said & believed; he was always making efforts from time to time to gain money, till his latest years, when he became a confirmed invalid. Meantime he gave up to my mother the annuity settled on him by Mr. Wedgwood . . . I am convinced that both on this subject, and on that of the separation from my dear mother, which was by mutual agreement, and in my opinion a justifiable & wise measure, under the circumstances, a full, clear, well considered statement would reduce the blame due to my father to a small amount.⁷

Whether or not the blame could actually be reduced “to a small amount,” one thing is clear: not long after Sara’s birth in 1802, her father became little more than an occasional visitor in the Lake District town of Keswick where Sara spent her childhood.

Keswick, as the travel literature of the time indicates, was as picturesque a landscape as one could imagine. Thomas West’s A Guide to the Lakes (1796) describes the “vast amphitheatre” of Keswick as a place where the traveler will see, “on one side of the lake . . . a rich and beautiful landscape of cultivated fields, rising to the eye, in fine inequalities, with noble groves of oak, happily dispersed . . . On the opposite shore you will find rocks and cliffs of stupendous height, hanging broken over the lake in horrible grandeur, some of them a thousand feet high, the woods climbing up their steep and shaggy sides, where mortal foot never yet approached” (195–96). John Housman’s A Descriptive Tour and Guide to the Lakes . . . (1800) boasts of the “romantic scenes” of Keswick, including “lofty Skiddaw,” which “lifts his brows in sullen and majestic grandeur”: “KESWICK is a small but neat and pleasant market-town, and, in general, well-built; with some good inns for the accommodation of travellers; and a weekly market on Saturdays, chiefly for woollen yarn (spun in the adjacent dales), a variety of fish from the lakes, and the finest mutton in the kingdom” (90).

Greta Hall, Keswick, was the Coleridge family home from July 1800. Sara’s autobiography envisions the property as an enchanted space. Behind the home was an orchard of apple and plum trees, and, beyond the orchard, a wood where “a rough path ran along at the bottom of the wood . . . Oh that rough path beside the [river] Greta! How much of my childhood, of my girlhood, of my youth, was spent there!” (SCAB 257). Coleridge’s father leased half of the sizeable home from William Jackson, who lived with his housekeeper, Mrs. Wilson (“Wilsy”), in the other half of the house. As tenants, they had 12 rooms at their disposal to Jackson’s 8. Robert Southey and Sarah’s sister Edith (Fricker) Southey soon joined the Coleridge’s at Greta. The Southey’s had only weeks earlier suffered their own loss in the death of their child Margaret Southey (1802–03). Southey hoped to comfort his wife Edith, who was “suffering bitterly,” with the presence of her sister and a newborn niece: “As soon as it shall please God to remove this little object, I shall, with all speed, set off for Cumberland. Edith will be nowhere so well as with her sister Coleridge. She has a little girl, some six months old, and I shall try and graft her into the wound, while it is yet fresh” (LRS 73–74). The plan failed miserably. They arrived in Keswick only two weeks after baby Margaret’s death. Edith, not surprisingly, grew increasingly dispirited in her new home; “indeed,” Robert declared, “the sight of the little Sara, and her infantine sounds, produce in me more shootings of recollection than are good. Coleridge had taught me to expect something beautiful in her: she is a fine child, but, like other fine children, my poor Margaret was the little wonder of every one who beheld her” (LRS 75). Sara’s father, in search of better health and happiness, left Keswick (and life in the Lake District more or less permanently) on December 20, 1803—only three days before Sara’s first birthday.

Robert Southey, who took Greta Hall for a temporary home, was now responsible for the care of not one but two families. Although he remained uncertain of the suitability of Greta Hall for years to come, he lived there for the remainder of his life. Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge first met in June 1794 at Oxford, where Southey was a student at Balliol College. Speck’s hyperbolic comparison of the two men provides a glimpse of their vastly different personalities: “Coleridge was notoriously an elemental force of nature, like a hurricane or volcano, bowling over all who met him by the sheer force of his personality . . . Southey by contrast was stable, controlling violent emotions with an iron will, and applying himself to a rigid discipline of hard work and productivity” (42). The two concocted an idyllic plan to form a utopian “pantisocracy” on the banks of the Susquehanna River. The men required wives for the scheme to succeed, and they (along with fellow poet Robert Lovell) quickly married three Fricker sisters. The plan failed, but the marriages remained. When the Southeys moved into Greta Hall, Sarah and the children were gradually displaced.⁸ Sara, her mother, and brothers Hartley (1796–1849) and Derwent (1800–83) occupied a comparatively meager space in the home: “The staircase, to the right of the kitchen, which you ascended from the passage[,] led to a landing place, filled with bookcases. A few steps more led to a little bedroom, which mama and I occupied: that dear bedroom, where I lay down in joy or in sorrow nightly for so many years of comparative health & happiness, whence I used to hear the river flowing and sometimes the Forge hammer in the distance, at the end of the field, but seldom other sounds in the night, save of stray animals” (SCAB 258).

A SICKLY CHILD

The River Greta played a key role in Sara’s life. The river not only provided the rhythmic background for Sara’s youth, but also set the stage for a calamitous event that came to represent a life of distress and ill health. At two years of age Sara was playing a game with her brother Derwent, when suddenly she fell into the river, slipping from the bridge “into the current” (SCAB 251–52). The event has a strange, mythic quality. On the one hand, Sara wrote playfully of her unexpected fall into the Greta in a poem for her children, “The Plunge”:

So while his poor sister was pulling a lily,

Not thinking how soon she’d be made to look silly,

While o’er the broad leaves and white blossoms she bent,

Down, down with a plunge in the water she went.⁹

In her autobiography, however, Sara describes the event as a seminal moment in her life. She was saved by a neighbor, but the damage was done: “my constitution had received a shock, and I became tender and delicate.” Previously, Sara had been “a thriving child,” but now she no longer slept with ease, became “nervous & insomnolent,” and required the nurturing care of her mother to rest in her cradle each night: “This weakness has accompanied me through life” (SCAB 251–52). Indeed, Sara admits that she cannot remember anything of the event but the “echo” and “reflection of past remembrances.” Still, the reported fall into the River Greta that left her weak and nervous left an “indelible trace” on her memory. What is more, the accident parallels an untimely childhood event that her father similarly experienced at the banks of a river.

Sara’s father frequently blamed his own ill health and lifelong physical pains—pains that led him to a lifelong addiction to opium—on a night spent down by the banks of the River Otter as a boy of between seven and nine years old. The event began as a simple matter of sibling rivalry and some minced cheese: a brother’s act of unkindness, an exchange of blows, a mother’s arrival, and anticipated flogging. Out of the house he ran, out of town, to the top of a hill near the banks of the River Otter:

There I stayed; my rage died away; but my obstinancy vanquished my fears—& taking out a little shilling book which had, at the end, morning & evening prayers, I very devoutly repeated them—thinking at the same time with inward & gloomy satisfaction, how miserable my Mother must be! . . . It grew dark—& I fell asleep—it was towards the latter end of October—& it proved a dreadful stormy night— / I felt the cold in my sleep, and dreamt that I was pulling a blanket over me, & actually pulled over me a dry thorn bush, which lay on the hill—in my sleep I had rolled from the top of the hill to within three yards of the River, which flowed by the unfenced edge of the bottom.—I awoke several times, and finding myself wet & stiff, and cold, closed my eyes again that I might forget it. (CL 1:353)

This singular ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1   Beauty
• 2   Education
• 3   Dreams
• 4   Criticism
• 5   Authority
• 6   Reason
• 7   Regeneration
• 8   Community
• 9   Death
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index