ADAM SISMAN
Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Friendship

DEDICATION

To George Misiewicz

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

ILLUSTRATIONS

MAPS

INTRODUCTION

PROLOGUE

PART I: Strangers

1. Revolution

2. Reaction

3. Idealism

4. Sedition

PART II: Friends

5. Contact

6. Retreat

7. Communion

8. Collaboration

9. Separation

10. Amalgamation

PART III: Acquaintances

11. Subordination

12. Estrangement

P.S. IDEAS, INTERVIEWS & FEATURES …

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Q&A: ADAM SISMAN TALKS TO SARAH O’REILLY

LIFE AT A GLANCE

TOP TEN FAVOURITE BOOKS

A WRITING LIFE

ABOUT THE BOOK

FRIENDSHIP NEGLECTED BY ADAM SISMAN

READ ON

HAVE YOU READ?

FIND OUT MORE

APPENDIX: Coleridge’s Plan for The Recluse

PLATES

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

NOTES

PRAISE

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

ILLUSTRATIONS

The street in Bristol where the Pantisocrats lived for most of 1795. Line drawing by Edmund New.

Racedown Lodge in Dorset, occupied by Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy from 1795 to 1797. Line drawing by Edmund New.

The Nether Stowey cottage, home of the Coleridge family from the end of 1796 until the middle of 1799. Line drawing by Edmund New, 1914.

Alfoxden Park, rented by William and Dorothy Wordsworth in 1797–98. Line drawing by Edmund New, 1914.

Wordsworth at the age of twenty-eight, by William Shuter. (Courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library)

Wordsworth aged thirty-six. Drawing by Henry Edridge. (Dove Cottage, The Wordsworth Trust)

Coleridge in 1798, by an unknown German artist. (Mrs Gardner)

Coleridge early in 1804, by James Northcote. (Dove Cottage, The Wordsworth Trust)

Silhouettes of Dorothy Wordsworth in 1806, and of Sara Hutchinson and Mary Wordsworth in 1827. (Dove Cottage, The Wordsworth Trust)

Miniatures of Sara Coleridge in 1809 (Getty Images) and of Annette Vallon, date unknown. (Dove Cottage, The Wordsworth Trust)

Hartley Coleridge, aged ten. (Frontispiece to Vol 1 of Hartley Coleridge’s Poems, 1851)

The Great Track over the top of the Quantocks, photographed in the 1930s. (Kit Houghton)

‘Alfoxton Park’ by Miss Sweeting, from a book of views published in the 1830s.

Greta Hall, illustrated in 1887. Postcard from Souvenir of the English Lakes. (Jeronime Palmer and Scott Ligertwood of Greta Hall, Keswick)

Landscape surrounding Greta Hall. Engraving from W. Westall’s original drawing. (Dove Cottage, The Wordsworth Trust)

Portrait of Robert Southey by James Sharpies, probably painted in 1795. (Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives)

Self-portrait by William Hazlitt, painted c.1802. (Maidstone Museum and Art Gallery, Kent/The Bridgeman Art Library)

Thomas Poole. (Frontispiece to Thomas Poole and his Friends by Mrs Henry Sandford, 1888)

Charles Lamb, after an original drawing by Robert Hancock, 1798. (From Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey by Joseph Cottle, 1847)

Joseph Cottle. (Dove Cottage, The Wordsworth Trust)

Leathes Water (Thirlmere), a mezzotint based on a pencil and wash drawing by John Constable made in 1806. (Dove Cottage, The Wordsworth Trust)

Grasmere in the early nineteenth century, by George Fennel Robson. (Dove Cottage, The Wordsworth Trust)

Ullswater. Engraving by Miller after Allom, c.1830. (Getty Images)

Three contemporary drawings by John Harden of Brathay Hall, not far from Grasmere. (Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal/The Bridgeman Art Library)

Dove Cottage, photographed early in the twentieth century. (Getty Images)

Part-title portraits: Southey (page 1) and Wordsworth (page 121) after original drawings by Robert Hancock, 1796 and 1798 respectively. From Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey by Joseph Cottle (1847). Coleridge (page 327) by Peter Vandyke, 1795. courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

MAPS

INTRODUCTION

One June afternoon, more than two hundred years ago, a young man halted by a field-gate overlooking an isolated Dorset valley. His name was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and he was twenty-four years old. He had walked forty miles since leaving his cottage in the Quantock Hills early the previous morning.

Beyond the gate, a cornfield stretched downhill towards the side of a substantial house, built in brick and partly covered by grey stucco render. In the kitchen garden two figures, a man and a woman, both about his own age, could be seen working; first one, then the other, paused and looked up towards where he stood.

The lane continued in a wide arc to the front of the house. Too impatient to take this long way round, Coleridge vaulted over the gate and bounded across the field towards the waiting figures, leaping through the corn. The two watchers, William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, retained a distinct memory of this sight almost half a century afterwards.¹

Until this moment, Wordsworth and Coleridge had met only a handful of times. Now Coleridge planned to stay several days with his new friend – but they soon found that this was not enough, and he repeatedly postponed his departure. The two had much to say to each other, and after more than three weeks neither wanted to part; so it was rapidly arranged that the Wordsworths would move to the Quantocks. There the poets lived in close proximity, meeting almost daily, composing and developing their work together. This was an intensely creative time for them both. Under the constant stimulus of the other, each man would write some of his finest poetry. Ideas, themes and images would pass back and forth between them, one poem prompting a response from the other in exhilarating succession. And though this miraculously fertile period lasted only sixteen months, it was the seed-time of fruit that would ripen through the subsequent decade. Two years later their association would be renewed in the Lakes, where there would be a brief reprise of their poetic duet.

If Coleridge’s arrival on that June afternoon in 1797 was not the beginning of their acquaintance, it was the beginning of their intimacy. Previously they had exchanged ideas, expressed mutual regard, and offered friendly criticism. Now the relationship became much closer, one of dialogue and collaboration, of sharing plans and dreams.

The names of Wordsworth and Coleridge have been linked ever since. They have passed into legend as a pair, like Boswell and Johnson, or Lennon and McCartney. The myth-making began while they were still living, and has continued uninterrupted. The image of these two young geniuses, the progenitors of English Romanticism, roaming the Quantock Hills in an ecstasy of shared understanding and creative fulfilment, is irresistibly romantic. Their subsequent estrangement, quarrel, and superficial reconciliation complete a story as poignant as any love affair.

A shared ambition dominated the friendship between the two men. Both believed ardently that poetry could occupy a central place in the culture of the age. The visionary Coleridge dreamed of a great poem – perhaps greater than any yet written. It would encompass all human knowledge, and take twenty years to write. It would ensure the poet a place among the immortals; more important, it would hasten in the ‘blessed day’ of Mankind’s redemption, ‘the day fairer than this’: beginning where Milton left off.

Coleridge had scarcely sketched his utopian scheme before deciding that his friend was better suited to realise it. Wordsworth accepted the commission. For many years he struggled heroically to write this impossible poem, until at last he abandoned it, bitterly disappointed. The friendship that had been so productive at the beginning would end in failure.

‘Why do people have to like Wordsworth and hate Coleridge and vice versa?’ asked Edmund Blunden.² The residual bitterness after their falling out has tended to distort subsequent interpretation of the relations between the poets. As a stimulating scholar who has written recently on relations between the two men has pointed out, understanding of them has been bedevilled by partisanship: ‘The practice of elevating one figure over the other has dominated Coleridge and Wordsworth biography for decades; to some extent because the very closeness of the two writers was later wrecked by savage disagreement. Interpreting one of them sympathetically almost inevitably means showing the other in a bad light.’³

My book is an attempt to escape from this biographical impasse, by concentrating on the friendship itself, at its most intense when both men were young and full of hope. Its core is the period of six and a half years between Coleridge’s exuberant arrival at Racedown Lodge and his sad departure for Malta. This is the story of two marvellously gifted young men, for whom anything seemed possible. At the outset, their friendship was beneficial to both, pushing each to higher aspirations. Overhanging all was their joint mission, to fulfil the hopes of a generation disappointed at the failure of the French Revolution: nothing less than a poem that would change the world.

PROLOGUE

‘How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world!’ exclaimed Charles James Fox on hearing of the fall of the Bastille, ‘and how much the best!’ The long struggle between Britain and France that began in 1793 has obscured the fact that most Britons (many of whom subsequently modified or concealed their enthusiasm) welcomed the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. Few then predicted how it would end. Some saw the changes transforming France as overdue, introducing the French to the liberties long enjoyed by Englishmen; others rather more excitedly as a precursor of the millennium, when the brotherhood of man would be established on earth. Half a lifetime afterwards, Robert Southey, though by then a staunch Tory, could still vividly recall the excitement of that time: ‘Few persons but those who lived in it can conceive or comprehend what the memory of the French Revolution was, nor what a visionary world seemed to open upon those who were just entering it. Old things seemed passing away, and nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the human race.’¹

Even the Prime Minister William Pitt, later the most determined enemy of the French Republic, then looked forward to a reconstructed and free France as ‘one of the most brilliant powers of Europe’. France was arguably the most powerful nation in the world, certainly the centre of European culture and thought. Indeed, the events in France seemed likely to spread a beneficial influence everywhere. ‘The French, Sir, are not only asserting their own rights, but they are advancing the general liberties of mankind,’ declared John Cartwright, the Lincolnshire reformer. Like Cartwright, the nonconformist minister Richard Price was a veteran in the cause of liberty; according to him, the success of the American colonies in winning their independence was ‘one step ordained by providence’ towards the millennium. In a sermon preached to the London Revolution Society on 4 November 1789, Price gave thanks that he had lived to see this ‘eventful period’.* He predicted ‘a general amendment beginning in human affairs; the dominion of kings changed for the dominion of laws, and the dominion of priests giving way to the dominion of reason and conscience’.²

In almost every country of pre-Revolutionary Europe, princes ruled without check; their subjects suffered, unprotected by laws; perhaps worst of all, taxes were raised without consulting those who would have to pay them. France had been one of the most lamentable examples. In England, by contrast, the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 had limited the power of the monarchy, and established the rights of its subjects: liberty of conscience, the right to be governed by elected representatives, the freedom to make money and to hold property. Now, at last (a century after the British), the French were catching up. The rest of Europe would surely follow.

Such was the British view. There was a widespread complacency about the British way of doing things. How could the status quo be at fault when the nation was so rich? The struggles of the seventeenth century had been absorbed into the political culture, and were no longer threatening; on the contrary, they were a source of pride, evidence of superiority. However absurd this might seem to Americans, and indeed to peoples still subject to British rule, Britons were generally united in seeing their country as a lighthouse of liberty and prosperity on the edge of a benighted continent.

Even so, the unreformed House of Commons was hard to defend. Many MPs held sinecures granted by the Crown, which ensured that they would support the King’s government, right or wrong. Men went into Parliament expressly to obtain such posts. Elections were flagrantly corrupt; with only a small number of electors, who were easily bought, often by the simple expedient of providing free drink. Some seats had a mere handful of voters, and in one notorious example, none at all. In rural constituencies, a large proportion of the electorate owed their livelihoods to powerful landowners, who as a result virtually controlled elections. Such abuses, distressing in themselves, were (in the view of many) symptomatic of a deeper problem: as constituted, the House of Commons failed to represent the nation as a whole. Parliament was controlled by a self-perpetuating oligarchy, one that left significant sections of society without a voice. Pitt introduced a Bill to reform some of the more obvious abuses, only to have it thrown out by a suspicious House of Commons. Radicals called for bolder constitutional reforms, including secret ballots, regular elections, extension of the franchise, and restrictions on the power of the Crown to make appointments. Yet there was little popular pressure for change. A great many Britons agreed with Dr Johnson when he remarked that most schemes of political improvement were very laughable things.

The apparent success of the French Revolution encouraged British radicals. The dormant Society for Constitutional Information revived; a group of well-meaning young aristocrats designated themselves the Society of Friends of the People; and at the other end of the social scale a London shoemaker founded a Corresponding Society for the encouragement of constitutional discussion, which in time gave birth to similar societies around the country. Messages of solidarity were sent to France at each revolutionary development. The presses ran hot with political pamphlets. In dissenting circles, where many of the radicals were to be found, there was a strong hope that the laws barring from public office those who refused to conform to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England might be abolished, or at least relaxed. Dissenters in England were traditionally progressive; and increasingly discontented with an established order from which they were to a large extent excluded. Toleration was not enough; participation was what they wanted. Unitarians, who formed the intellectual elite of the dissenting movement, were rational Christians, preaching science, enlightenment and tolerance, and rejecting the mysticism of the Trinity. Not content with eventual salvation, they hoped for a better life on earth. For a Unitarian like the philosopher-chemist Joseph Priestley, the need for reform was self-evident; the system was clearly rotten.

Of course there were differences between these radicals: while some harked back to 1688, to the establishment of a constitutional monarchy, others looked back further, to 1649, and the foundation of a republic. Another strand of radical opinion daringly discarded historical precedent, and asserted instead the natural and inalienable rights of man. Such differences, not always obvious at first, would become more distinct as the Revolution developed.

Even those John Bulls (and there were plenty of them) who believed that the British constitution could not be bettered had cause to welcome the news from France. For the century that preceded the Revolution, France had been Britain’s principal enemy in wartime and chief rival for empire. With a population almost three times that of Britain and a comparable overseas trade, plus revenues twenty-five times those of the new United States, France possessed resources unmatched by any country in the world. She had been contained only by heroic effort; she remained a dangerous Catholic power, a permanent menace to British security and Protestant freedoms. Now, perhaps, the long struggle was over. Until 1789, French strength had been concentrated in the hands of the French king. Within a matter of months, the French monarchy had been weakened; French despotism overthrown; the French threat seemingly diminished.

To the young, the tumultuous events in Paris – the gathering of the Estates-General, the tennis court oath, the formation of the National Assembly, the jostling crowds in the streets, the passionate rhetoric, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the sweeping reforms, the sudden collapse of the ancien régime – seemed irresistibly dramatic. The solemn ceremonies that took place throughout France promised an end to the abuses of the past. Above all, the storming of the Bastille, and the release of prisoners arbitrarily detained there, symbolised the liberation of the people as a whole. This inspiring moment was commemorated by the teenage Samuel Taylor Coleridge in one his earliest poems, ‘The Destruction of the Bastille’:

I see, I see! glad Liberty succeed With

every patriot* Virtue in her train!

For him, as for so many Britons, the French were simply following where Englishmen had gone before:

And still, as erst, let favour’d Britain be

First ever of the first and freest of the free!

* He was sixty-six, and died two years later.

* In the eighteenth century, a ‘patriot’ was one prepared to put duty to ones country above personal or sectional interest. During the Revolution, the term came to have a more specific meaning: one willing to defend the Republic against foreign invasion.

PART I Strangers

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven!¹

1 REVOLUTION

In the summer of 1790, William Wordsworth, then twenty years old and a commoner at St John’s College, Cambridge, together with Robert Jones, another Cambridge undergraduate, made a vacation walking tour across Europe. They set out from Calais on 14 July, the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. This was the climax of the week-long Fête de la Fédération, culminating in a tremendous spectacle in the capital, attended by 400,000 delegates from all over the country, and celebrated throughout France. The two undergraduates walked through towns and villages decorated with triumphal arcs and window-garlands; the whole nation seemed ‘mad with joy’.¹ Wordsworth was a self-confessedly stiff young man, proud and prickly, but even he found it hard to resist the intoxicating mood:

…’twas a time when Europe was rejoiced,

France standing on the top of golden hours,

And human nature seeming born again.²

The thoroughfares of France were crowded with fédérés returning home from the festivities in Paris. Wordsworth and his companion fell in with a ‘merry crowd’ of these; after supper on a riverbank they danced around the table, hand in hand with the celebrants:

All hearts were open, every tongue was loud

With amity and glee. We bore a name

Honoured in France, the name of Englishmen,

And hospitably did they give us hail

As their forerunners in a glorious course;

And round and round the Board they danced again.³

At such a moment it was easy to assume that the Revolution had run its course, that a healthy France had purged itself, that monarch and people were united in a delightful new equilibrium. Had not the King sworn to uphold the decrees of the Assembly in front of a vast crowd at the Champ de Mars? Had he and his family not decamped from the magnificent Palace of Versailles to the Tuileries, in the very heart of Paris (albeit under duress)? Had he not appeared in public to greet the Mayor at the Hôtel de Ville, his hat adorned with the Revolutionary red-and-blue cockade?

‘It was a most interesting period to be in France,’ Wordsworth wrote to his sister from the shores of Lake Constance.⁴ But not that interesting: he and his friend Jones bypassed Paris, even though their route took them close to the capital, where all the most interesting events were happening. The Revolution was not their affair; they were headed for the Alps, then a sacred destination in the cult of the sublime. The young Englishmen joined in the Revolutionary festivities as guests, rather than participants. In his great autobiographical poem The Prelude, most of which was written a decade or more after the events described, Wordsworth admitted that

… I looked upon these things

As from a distance – heard, and saw, and felt,

Was touched, but with no intimate concern –⁵

(At this point a cautionary note is appropriate. On the one hand, The Prelude dramatises what Wordsworth called ‘spots in time’ – moments of special significance from his inner life. It is the principal source for the biography of his youth, particularly some obscure years of his young manhood for which the poem provides almost the only illumination. On the other hand, it cannot be wholly relied upon, and in at least some aspects is misleading. The emotional and psychological aspects of the poem may be more trustworthy than the merely factual and chronological – though perhaps not entirely so. In The Prelude, Wordsworth plots the growth of a poet’s mind’, from his infancy until he came into contact with Coleridge in his late twenties. But Wordsworth was writing in retrospect, trying to make sense of his past from the perspective of his mid-thirties. He had become a different man from the youth he was writing about. Not only was his memory fallible; there was a tendency in him, as in all of us, to manipulate the past in order to explain the present. Wordsworth’s biographers cannot avoid using The Prelude, but they need to do so cautiously, and to seek for confirmatory evidence elsewhere.)

The two undergraduates returned home in October for their final term at Cambridge, after trudging more than a thousand miles* through France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany and Belgium in just under three months (Wordsworth’s admiring sister Dorothy traced his path on the map). This was a poor man’s Grand Tour, directed towards natural rather than cultural wonders, and undertaken on foot rather than by coach. Walking holidays were then coming into vogue, particularly for undergraduates and young clergymen – though few undertook a journey as ambitious as this one. Many of Wordsworth’s Cambridge friends had thought the scheme mad and impractical, with so many difficulties as to render it impossible. Nevertheless, such tours were not completely unknown: two years before, William Frend and his old schoolmate Richard Tylden had trodden a similar route. Frend was a Cambridge Fellow, and it is possible that his example inspired Wordsworth. The poet William Lisle Bowles was another who had made a recent walking tour of the Continent. Wordsworth’s school friend Joshua Wilkinson would undertake two walking tours in Europe in the following three years, and in 1798 would publish The Wanderer, a book based on his experiences. But walking tours were still something new; indeed the Oxford English Dictionary credits Wordsworth, in speaking of this tour, as the first to use the word ‘pedestrian’ in its literal rather than its metaphorical sense. A few years later an anonymous reviewer in the Monthly Magazine noted approvingly the ‘increasing frequency of these pedestrian tours’. By 1815 the editor of the Bristol Journal could refer to ‘this age of Pedestrianism’.⁶

Most of these new walkers did not venture abroad. Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, published in 1785, had helped to popularise the notion of internal tourism, exploring the wild and remote corners of the British Isles, until then generally assumed to be not worth going to see. Even before this, back in 1769, Thomas Gray had made a tour of the Lake District, and by the end of the century the Lakes had begun to attract tourists.* A succession of guidebooks to the regions of Britain appeared. Young men clad in sturdy boots and heavy coats strode up hills and along valleys, admiring landscapes previously unconsidered. Walking provided access to picturesque vistas otherwise inaccessible. Moreover, it was a form of escapism, disapproved of by the respectable. There was something intrinsically egalitarian – almost democratic – about this new habit. While the Grand Tour was available only to the very wealthy, walking tours, especially tours in Britain, could be made by anyone with the necessary leisure and modest funds to cover essential expenses. Such tours brought the middle-class walker into contact with the common people who shared the roads, while the rich rattled past in their coaches.† Dressed like tramps, the new walkers endured the same hardships and privations.

There was camaraderie on the road, as Wordsworth and Jones had discovered. Towards the end of their journey they passed through another country in revolt; the Belgians, inspired by their French neighbours, had risen against their ruler, the Austrian Emperor.

… a glorious time,

A happy time that was. Triumphant looks

Were then the common language of all eyes:

As if awaked from sleep, the nations hailed

Their great expectancy; the fife of war

Was then a spirit-stirring sound indeed,

A blackbird’s whistle in a vernal grove.⁷

Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France appeared in print within weeks of Wordsworth’s return to England. (This was a response to Richard Price’s address to the London Revolution Society, now published as a pamphlet.) Burke was then in his sixtieth year; his Reflections were delivered with the authority of an elder statesman, the most intellectual of the Whigs, an exponent of principle in politics, a champion of liberty, and a philosopher of the sublime. Assessing what had happened in France, he argued that nothing good could come from a complete break with the past: on the contrary, such an upheaval must inevitably lead to bloodshed, war and tyranny. He did not oppose change of any kind; but he believed it must be gradual rather than sudden, and rooted in the traditions of the people. His book became a bestseller, and his ideas were much discussed, but by no means generally accepted; the Prince of Wales, for example, then a young radical, scorned it as a jeremiad, ‘a farrago of nonsense’. In the House of Commons, the Prince’s mentor Fox could not resist describing the new government of France as ‘the most stupendous and glorious edifice of liberty which had been erected on the foundation of human integrity in any time or country’. Fox and Burke had long been political allies, and when an indignant Burke voiced his opposition to ‘all systems built on abstract rights’ in the debate, Fox whispered his hope that though they disagreed, they might still remain friends. Burke spurned his appeal, declaring aloud that their friendship was at an end. Fox rose to reply, but was so hurt that he could not speak for some minutes, while tears trickled down his cheeks.

Burke’s Reflections infuriated radicals, all the more so because Burke had been such an eloquent critic of the British government at the time of the American Revolution, fifteen years earlier. It provoked any number of hostile responses – including an essay written by Robert Southey, then a Westminster schoolboy – the most famous being Tom Paine’s colossally successful Rights of Man. These in turn inspired further ripostes, one delivered by Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, who had initially lauded the French attempts to free themselves from arbitrary rule, but who had come, like Burke, to deplore the results when the passions of human nature were ‘not regulated by religion, or controlled by law’.

Meanwhile Wordsworth had left Cambridge with a mere pass degree, a disappointment to his relatives who had hoped that he might have done well enough to be elected to the Fellowship reserved for men from Cumberland, succeeding his uncle William Cookson. They castigated him for having undertaken such an arduous walking tour in his final long vacation, when he should have been studying. Wordsworth’s future was not a matter for him alone; a successful career would bring influence that could be used for the benefit of the whole family. But he was stubborn. The more his seniors tried to guide him, the more he resisted. An orphan from the age of thirteen, he had since been dependent on his grandfather and two uncles who acted as guardians; with no home of their own, he and his siblings had suffered slights from tactless relatives and insolent servants. Pride and restraint were at war within him. Open rebellion was not an option for Wordsworth; he could not afford to defy his uncles while he remained reliant on them. The most that he could do was to thwart their plans for him.

After quitting Cambridge, Wordsworth spent some months in London, where ‘Free as a colt at pasture on the hills/I ranged at large’.⁸ He feasted greedily on the spectacle offered by what was then the greatest city in the world: the bustle, the theatres, the shops, the pleasure gardens of Vauxhall and Ranelagh, the prostitutes and the fashionable ladies, the destitute and the wealthy, the extraordinary variety of sights and sounds and smells, all the more extraordinary to one who had grown up in the remote Lakes. As a spectator he attended the law courts, and watched the debates in Parliament, where he marvelled at Pitt’s sustained oratory and was inspired by Burke’s evergreen eloquence.⁹ His reactions suggest that on the great issues of the moment he was not yet parti pris, even though he was mixing with radicals sympathetic to the French revolutionaries. On Sundays he would often dine with Samuel Nicholson, a Unitarian and a member of the Society for Constitutional Information, afterwards going on with him to hear the popular sermons preached by the minister Joseph Fawcett at the dissenters’ meeting house in Old Jewry. It was probably at this time too that he met another radical dissenter, the bookseller-publisher Joseph Johnson, who lived above his shop in St Paul’s Churchyard.¹⁰ Johnson, who would be Wordsworth’s first publisher, combined business acumen with good taste; among the eminent writers he published were Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, William Cowper, Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Malthus, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and Maria Edgeworth. He was also publisher of the liberal monthly the Analytical Review, and was then in the process of publishing the first part of Paine’s Rights of Man.

In the late spring of 1791 Wordsworth left London for Wales, to stay with his walking companion Robert Jones and his sisters. ‘He seems so happy that it is probable he will remain there all the summer,’ observed his sister Dorothy. ‘Who would not be happy enjoying the company of three young ladies in the Vale of Clewyd [sic] and without a rival?’¹¹ Despite these attractions, Wordsworth was able to tear himself away; he and Jones went on a walking tour of north Wales, and made a memorable night ascent of Snowdon to see the sunrise from the summit.*

To his friends at this time, Wordsworth affected a devil-may-care nonchalance. ‘I am doomed to be an idler throughout my whole life,’ he boasted to another Cambridge friend, William Mathews, after a year in which he cheerfully admitted to doing very little. His family was now trying to steer him towards the Church, but Wordsworth did not relish the prospect of ‘vegetating on a paltry curacy’. Fortunately he was still, at the age of twenty-one, too young to take holy orders; he could afford to look about him a while yet. He appeared to be thinking as much of his own prospects when he urged Mathews to find ‘some method of obtaining an Independence’, which would ‘enable you to get your bread unshackled by the necessity of professing a particular system of opinions… The field of Letters is very extensive, and it is astonishing if we cannot find some little corner, which with a little tillage will produce us enough for the necessities, nay even the comforts, of life.’¹²

Wordsworth counted himself a ‘philosopher’, in the original sense of a lover of wisdom, one devoted to the search for fundamental truth. In the parlance of the time, the term might equally be applied to a scientist or a naturalist as to a student of political or moral philosophy, or metaphysics. At this stage Wordsworth was far from certain what kind of life lay ahead of him. While at Cambridge he had become increasingly aware of his poetic gifts. The ‘instinctive humbleness’ he felt at the very thought of publication began to ‘melt away’; his ‘dread awe of mighty names’ softened; increasingly he felt a ‘fellowship’ with the authors he revered, and he was filled with ‘a thousand hopes’, ‘a thousand tender dreams’, as ‘a morning gladness’ settled on his mind. He had already completed one long poem, ‘An Evening Walk’; this achievement encouraged the ‘daring thought’ that he

… might leave

Some monument behind me which pure hearts

Should reverence … ¹³

Yet his feeling of fellowship with the great poets of the past was accompanied by a sense of alienation in the present. At Cambridge he had often been melancholy, conscious that he did not belong. There was ‘a strangeness in my mind’, a solitariness, an impression that he was different. Sometimes he would leave his university friends and walk out into the surrounding country, ‘turning the mind in upon itself’. Then again he would feel

The strength and consolation which were mine.

The swelling appreciation of the powers latent within him strengthened his conviction that he was ‘a chosen son’ of Nature.¹⁴

Towards the end of the year Wordsworth returned to France, to pass the year in Orléans, which until the Revolution had been a fashionable destination for young Englishmen, but where now (as he would discover) only a handful remained. It seems that he had no particular plan beyond that of improving his French, in the vague hope that this would qualify him for the post of travelling companion to some young gentleman. His uncles would have preferred him to return to Cambridge, to study oriental literature. ‘William has a great attachment to poetry,’ remarked his sister Dorothy to her friend Jane Pollard, ‘which is not the most likely thing to produce his advancement in the world.’¹⁵

The country to which he returned in November 1791 was very different from the one he had left the year before. France was in a state of turbulence; the apparent equilibrium had proved illusory. The National Assembly was supplanted by a Legislative Assembly, which would be replaced while Wordsworth was still in France by a National Convention. Each new body proved more susceptible than its predecessor to Revolutionary rhetoric, and each member tried to outdo his peers in crowd-pleasing Revolutionary zeal. The debate was increasingly histrionic. Publications such as Jean-Paul Marat’s L’Ami du peuple set a tone of vituperative abuse. Factions began to form: the most radical grouping found a permanent place on the left side – the ‘left wing’ – of the Manège (the converted riding school where the Assembly met), the most conservative on the right. The King had displayed his commitment to constitutional monarchy by attempting to flee the country, only to be escorted back from Varennes (not far from the border) under restraint; National Guardsmen had opened fire on their fellow citizens in suppressing a demonstration at the Champ de Mars. Frenchman had fired on Frenchman; brother had killed brother. It became clear that the Revolution was not yet complete.

This time Wordsworth travelled through France by coach rather than on foot. His route to Orléans took him through Paris, where he spent a few days exploring, hastening to the Champ de Mars to sniff the grapeshot, listening to the debates in the Jacobin Club* and the Assembly, pocketing a stone as a relic from the ruins of the Bastille. There he sat in the sunshine, ‘affecting more emotion than I felt’. He admitted to being more moved by a painting, the baroque Magdalene de Le Brun, displayed in a Carmelite convent while religious music played in the background for the benefit of visitors – now almost forgotten, but then one of the must-see sights of Paris.¹⁶

At this moment the young Wordsworth appears to have had no more than a vague sympathy for the Revolution. By the time he left France a year later he was ready to take up service for the cause, however dangerous – even, if necessary, to sacrifice his life.¹⁷ Such a change could not have occurred overnight; it seems more plausible that Wordsworth’s loyalties were won gradually during his stay in France. As he became more familiar with the language, so he was better able to comprehend what was being said and written all around him. And as a result he was better able to form his own judgements about the behaviour and character of those he encountered. It was natural that the longer he stayed in France, the more he should identify with French concerns. At first he felt as if he had arrived at a theatre when the play was already far advanced. By the end of his stay he felt ready to act a part himself.

The Revolution reached its crisis while Wordsworth was in France. Since his flight to Varennes the King was no longer trusted; there were persistent rumours that he was conspiring with émigrés and foreign powers to usurp the new constitution. In April the nation declared war on ‘the King of Bohemia and Hungary’ (the Austrian Emperor Leopold, brother of the hated Marie Antoinette); by the summer the French were at war with the Emperor’s allies, the Prussians, as well. Shouting demonstrators burst into the Tuileries, forcing Louis to don a red bonnet and drink a glass of wine with them, which he did with courage and good humour. The Prussians issued a manifesto calling on the French to rise up against their Revolutionary ‘oppressors’, and threatening an ‘exemplary and unforgettable act of vengeance’ against the capital in the event of further outrages against the royal family. Morale in the old royal army was as low as could be; two-thirds of the officer corps had abandoned their commands, many to avoid a compulsory oath of allegiance to the new constitution, others in despair of disciplining the new patriot’ recruits.* Generals and their staffs defected en masse to the enemy. The Prussian army marched towards the border, crossing into France in mid-July. The Assembly formally decreed a state of emergency, ‘La Patrie en Danger’, and appealed for volunteers. These flocked to Paris from the provinces, aflame with Revolutionary ardour. A further decree allowed all citizens to enrol in the National Guard, creating ‘a nation in arms’. Excitement crackled in the streets, and on the morning of 10 August an angry crowd gathered in front of the Tuileries. The King’s Swiss Guards retreated inside the palace. The royal family fled to the Assembly, where the King appealed for shelter. After a flurry of shots, Louis sent an order to his Guards to stand down. The crowd stormed the palace, pursuing the Guards and courtiers out into the streets, where they were hunted down and slaughtered.

Now that his authority had collapsed, Louis XVI was no longer relevant; the monarchy was suspended, and soon abolished. The royal family was imprisoned in the Temple, the gloomy medieval home of the Knights Templar. The Assembly accepted Robespierre’s proposal to summon a National Convention, elected by universal (male) suffrage, for the purpose of framing a new constitution. Meanwhile the Prussians advanced steadily. First one fortress, then another fell to them. The mood in Paris became jittery. More than a thousand suspected counter-revolutionaries’ were taken into custody. A guillotine was erected outside the Tuileries.

It was difficult for Wordsworth to follow the changing situation in Paris and the fighting on the borders. In a letter home he confessed that, ‘in London you have perhaps a better opportunity of being informed of the general concerns of France, than in a petty provincial town in the heart of the kingdom itself’.¹⁸ Nevertheless, it was impossible for any resident of France not to be aware of the upsurge in patriotic feeling at this time. Every town saw parades and ceremonies, introduced by speeches of lofty rhetoric; Revolutionary clubs like the ubiquitous Jacobins began to usurp the powers of local government:

… ‘Twas in truth an hour Of

universal ferment; mildest men

Were agitated; and commotions, strife

Of passion and opinion, filled the walls

Of peaceful houses with unquiet sounds.¹⁹

This was a cultural revolution. The young men in its vanguard aimed to introduce a sterner moral code into public life, in place of the lax cynicism of the ancien régime. These zealots were steeped in the classics, whose authors presented an ideal of civic virtue, of loyalty to the Republic triumphing over selfish attachments. Their values were those of self-sacrifice, purity, duty, integrity, patriotism, stoicism and austerity; their model the Roman Republic; their heroes unimpeachable citizens like Cato or Cicero, whose oratory echoed down the centuries. Indeed, the revolutionaries identified themselves with the Roman Republic to what now seems a ludicrous extent. Had they not cast off a line of tyrannical kings, as the Romans had done? Had they not established a Senate? Had they not sworn solemn oaths, like the Horatii? Had they not defeated conspiracy after conspiracy to undermine the Republic?

The changes taking place extended into every area of life. A severe neoclassicism became the predominant style in painting, in sculpture, in architecture, in fashion. The artificiality of the eighteenth century was replaced by an emphasis on naturalness. Wigs began to disappear. Men wore their own hair, often short and straight, perhaps brushed forward in the Roman style, without powder or curls. (While at Cambridge Wordsworth had powdered his hair, but now he too cut it short.) Women wore loose, flowing, high-waisted dresses, in contrast to the ornate and cumbersome constructions favoured by fashionable ladies in pre-Revolutionary France. It became de rigueur to address everyone as ‘tu’, no matter how distant the relationship; while the titles ‘monsieur’ and ‘madame’ made way for the more democratic ‘citoyen’ and ‘citoyenne’.²⁰ These usages, though offensive or embarrassing to many, were enforced by the new authorities. Even the calendar would be replaced while Wordsworth was in France: Sunday was abolished and a ten-day week introduced. Year 1 began with the founding of the Republic, on 22 September 1792.

In Orléans Wordsworth lodged above a shop in the rue Royale owned by M. Gellet-Duvivier, a vociferous opponent of the Revolution. The other lodgers, three Cavalry officers and ‘a gentleman from Paris’, were of like mind. After a fortnight in Orleans, an apparently surprised Wordsworth reported that he had not met a single person ‘of wealth and circumstance’ favourable to the Revolution. ‘All the people of any opulence are aristocrates* [sic] and all the others democrats,’ he informed his brother Richard.²¹ His fellow lodgers introduced Wordsworth to the society of other officers stationed in the city. All were well-born, all ‘were bent upon undoing what was done’, and some spoke openly to this young foreigner of leaving to join the émigrés mustering with the enemy armies on the borders.

If the officers assumed that the Englishman (being an Englishman) would share their contempt for the lower orders, they were mistaken. Wordsworth was not one for whom rank and wealth commanded automatic respect, having grown up in the Lake District,

… which yet

Retaineth more of ancient homeliness,

Manners erect, and frank simplicity,

Than any other nook of English land.²²

Moreover, he and his siblings had a long-standing grievance against one of the ‘great’: the notoriously mean Earl of Lonsdale, the most powerful landowner in the north-west of England, who used his enormous wealth to exert absolute control over nine seats in Parliament, † enough in the chaotic politics of the eighteenth century to give him considerable political leverage. As an attorney, Wordsworth’s father John, a widower, had been Lonsdale’s* man of business, and in this capacity he had freely disbursed his own money on his employer’s behalf. After John Wordsworth’s sudden death in 1783 Lonsdale had refused to honour the outstanding sum, amounting to several thousand pounds. The Wordsworth orphans were left impoverished, dependent on relatives. Having been raised with certain expectations, they had been disappointed; a sense of injustice coloured their lives. Wordsworth had therefore the strongest personal reasons for resenting the power and the privileges of the wealthy, and his formative experience of the ruling class was of an especially odious specimen. This was an upbringing that might have been devised for the raising of a revolutionary. Many of the leading deputies in the Assembly were young men like Wordsworth: from the middle ranks of society, alienated from their families, well educated but carrying some form of grievance.

Cambridge had encouraged Wordsworth’s democratic inclinations, being ‘something …

Of a Republic, where all stood thus far

Upon equal ground, that they were brothers all

In honour, as in one community –

Scholars and Gentlemen – where, furthermore,

Distinction lay open to all that came,

And wealth and titles were in less esteem

Than talents and successful industry.²³

Nothing in Wordsworth’s background led him to share the officers’ assumptions about the innate superiority of the landowning classes. On the contrary, their disdain for the uncouth masses rankled with him.²⁴

But anyway, Wordsworth felt that it would be impossible to ‘undo what was done’, whatever the outcome of the war. The Revolutionary reforms were belated and inevitable. As he wrote to Mathews:

… suppose that the German army is at the gates of Paris, what will be the consequence? It will be impossible to make any material alteration in the constitution, impossible to reinstate the clergy in its ancient guilty splendor, impossible to give an existence to the noblesse similar to that it before enjoyed, impossible to add much to the authority of the King: Yet there are in France some [?millions – this word is indecipherable] – I speak without exaggeration – who expect that this will take place.²⁵

It seems likely that he was thinking of the officers when he wrote these words.

Wordsworth could not refrain from contrasting such disillusioned and resentful reactionaries with the gallant volunteers for the citizen army. Once again, as in 1790, he saw the roads of France crowded, this time not with fédérés returning from Paris, but with ‘the bravest Youth of France’ flocking to the frontier, in response to urgent appeals to defend the motherland from invasion. He witnessed many poignant scenes of farewell, the memory of which would move him to tears more than a decade afterwards. News from the front that summer was of disaster after disaster: the patriot army seemed unable to match the superior discipline of their opponents, all professional soldiers. To Wordsworth, the volunteers appeared as martyrs, going willingly to their certain doom.

… they seem’d

Like arguments from Heaven that ’twas a cause

Good, and which no one could stand up against

Who was not lost, abandoned, selfish, proud,

Mean, miserable, wilfully depraved,

Hater perverse of equity and truth.²⁶

Such idealism could scarcely fail to move an open-hearted young man. The fine principles for which the volunteers fought, dressed in heady rhetoric, were universal. The French were fighting to defend their country, but they were fighting in the name of all Mankind. The fire had been kindled in France, but it seemed possible, indeed likely, that the blaze would spread across Europe, perhaps even to England. In such circumstances, it is scarcely surprising that Wordsworth should have come to see himself as ‘a Patriot’:

… my heart was all

Given to the People, and my love was theirs.²⁷

Wordsworth was then a child of Rousseau; he was inclined to believe that men are naturally good, that the existing institutions of society are artificial, tending to perpetuate idleness, luxury and flattery: a rotten carapace that could be peeled back to reveal the healthy flesh underneath. The violence that accompanied the Revolution was not characteristic; it was simply necessary to correct the unnatural abuses of the past. A new social contract would be founded on Justice, Equality and Reason. Government would be by the ‘general will’, for the common good, and by consent of the citizenry. In making a new constitution, free from any encumbrances of the past, the Convention would be making a new kind of Man. For the young Wordsworth, the Revolution promised heaven on earth:

O pleasant exercise of hope and joy!

For great were the auxiliars which then stood

Upon our side, we who were strong in love.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven! O times,

In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways

Of custom, law, and statute took at once

The attraction of a country in romance –

When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights

When most intent of making of herself

A prime enchanter to assist the work

Which then was going forwards in her name.

Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth,

The beauty wore of promise … ²⁸

In Orléans Wordsworth became involved with a woman at least four years his senior, Annette Vallon, and it was probably on her account that he moved early in 1792 to her home town of Blois, some thirty miles down the Loire. It seems likely that he was one of the two Englishmen admitted on 3 February to the Revolutionary club in Blois, Les Amis de la Constitution.²⁹ Its President was Henri Grégoire, a radical cleric closely identified with the iconography of the Revolution: his image appears at the centre of Jacques-Louis David’s famous composition The Tennis-Court Oath.* As ‘Constitutional Bishop’ of Blois he had served as a member of the Constituent Assembly until its dissolution in September 1791. Former members of the Constituent Assembly were debarred from sitting in the new Legislative Assembly, so after its dissolution Grégoire had returned to Blois. On 14 July 1792, Federation Day, he delivered a fiery speech to Les Amis de la Constitution in which he prophesied that the Revolution would spread across the world. He hailed the patriot armies fighting for ‘la liberté de l’univers’:

The present augurs well for the future. Soon we shall witness the liberation of all humankind. Everything confirms that the coming revolution will set all of Europe free, and prove a consolation for the whole human race. Liberty has been fettered to thrones for far too long! She will burst those irons and chains and as she extends her influence beyond our horizons, will inaugurate the federation of all mankind!³⁰

Whether Wordsworth was present while this speech was being delivered is unknown. If not, he may well have read the transcript when it was published soon afterwards. In any case, Grégoire’s rhetoric gives a sense of the millenarian atmosphere in Revolutionary Blois at the time. Wordsworth was certainly aware of Grégoire; he later referred to him admiringly and quoted his words with approval.

In Blois, Wordsworth again lodged in a house with army officers, but here he met one different from the rest (and ostracised as a result): Michel Beaupuy, a captain who, though an aristocrat by birth, embraced the changes brought by the Revolution wholeheartedly. Beaupuy was thirty-seven, fifteen years older than Wordsworth, and he became a mentor to the younger man. Together they walked many a mile along the banks of the Loire, or in the forests that grew along the valley, engaged in earnest dialogues’, putting the world to rights:

Why should I not confess that earth was then

To me what an inheritance new-fallen

Seems, when the first time visited, to one

Who thither comes to find in it his home?

He walks about and looks upon the place

With cordial transport – moulds it and remoulds –

And is half pleased with things that are amiss,

T’will be such joy to see them disappear.³¹

In this spirit of comradely idealism, Wordsworth may even have fantasised about joining Beaupuy in an armed crusade to liberate Britain from monarchy and aristocracy. There is a passage in The Prelude that seems to hint at such a possibility, when he writes of a ‘philosophic war/Led by philosophers’.³² And why not? However unrealistic, Wordsworth’s dream of revolution in Britain was consistent with the rhetoric used by men like Grégoire.

Among Beaupuy’s qualities that impressed Wordsworth was his compassion for the poor, ‘a courtesy which had no air/Of condescension’. On one of their walks they chanced on a ‘hunger-bitten girl’, leading a heifer by a cord.

… at the sight my friend

In agitation said, ‘ ’Tis against that

Which we are fighting,’ I with him believed

Devoutly that a spirit was abroad

Which could not be withstood, that poverty,

At least like this, would in a little time

Be found no more … ³³

Such sympathies would linger in Wordsworth’s heart long after he had abandoned hope of revolutionary change.

On 2 September 1792, the fortress of Verdun fell to the Prussians. The French army prepared to make a last stand; if this failed, the road to Paris lay open before the invaders. Panic seized the capital; rumour spread that as the enemy arrived at the gates a ‘fifth column’ of aristocrats and priests would emerge from prison to murder the defenceless families of citizens away fighting. Marat fed the paranoia, urging the people to eliminate this threat from within. Mobs stormed prisons across the city, dragging out the inmates and slaughtering them in the street: old and young, men and women alike. The often mutilated corpses were stripped of their clothing, then loaded onto wagons and carted away for disposal. The newly severed head of one of Marie Antoinette’s closest friends, her former lady-in-waiting the Princesse de Lamballe, was impaled on a pike and waved jeeringly outside the Queen’s window. About half of all those imprisoned in Paris were massacred, among them more than two hundred priests. Three years before, the Revolution had begun with the joyous release of prisoners from their dark cells; now prisoners were hauled out into the light to be butchered.

The September Massacres, as they became known, shocked even the by-now hardened French public. More than a thousand people were murdered before the frenzy faded. Among the dead were fifty or so prisoners being transferred from Orléans, ambushed by a band of armed Parisians at Versailles. Blood was shed in Orléans itself in early September: a mob protesting against the high price of bread went on the rampage, burning and looting houses. The city authorities imposed a curfew and declared martial law, but by the time the National Guard had restored order, thirteen people had been killed in the riots. Wordsworth returned to Orléans from Blois some time in September; it is not known whether he was in time to witness the violence. He was then putting the finishing touches to his poem ‘Descriptive Sketches’; its conclusion welcomed the proclamation of the Republic by the Convention on 21 September:

Lo! From th’innocuous flames, a lovely birth!

It seems probable that these lines were written even as bloodstains were being scrubbed from the pavements of Paris.

Wordsworth was preparing to return to England. By this time it must have been obvious that Annette Vallon was pregnant; she would give birth to a daughter on 15 December. So why did Wordsworth leave France, just as he was about to become a father? He was certainly short of money. He may have believed that the time was ripe to publish his poems. Maybe he felt that he must return home to secure his future, to establish himself in the Church or some other profession, so that he would be able to provide for Annette and his child. Possibly he intended to marry her once he was established; Annette’s subsequent letters suggest that she expected him to do so. But she may have been deluding herself. It would have been difficult for him to make a career in the Church, with a foreign, Catholic wife and a child born out of wedlock. Perhaps he made promises to Annette that he did not mean to keep. The frustrating truth is that there is not enough evidence on which to base anything more than guesses at Wordsworth’s intentions.

The very day before the proclamation of the Republic, the French repelled the Prussians at Valmy, about a hundred miles east of Paris. This was the turn of the tide; the crisis had passed. Goethe, who was accompanying his patron, a general in the defeated army, immediately recognised the significance of the Revolutionary victory. That same evening, sitting in a circle of demoralised Prussian soldiers around a damp campfire, he attempted to lift the prevalent gloom by telling them: ‘From this place and this time forth commences a new era in world history and you can all say that you were present at its birth.’³⁴

In the House of Commons, Fox did not hide his delight at the French victory. For him, the ‘conspiracy’ of the reactionary powers (Prussia and Austria) threatened ‘not merely the ruin of liberty in France, but the ruin of liberty in England; the ruin of the liberty of man’. Like Fox, Wordsworth had come to see the fate of mankind as being bound up with that of the Revolution; he ‘laid this faith to heart’,

That if France prospered good men would not long

Pay fruitless worship to humanity.³⁵

In late October Wordsworth, ‘enflam’d with hope’, arrived in Paris on his way back to England. It was a moment of high political tension. The majority in the new Convention was attempting to assert its authority over those extra-parliamentary forces that had so recently wrought havoc in the capital. One of the most prominent of those trying to re-establish the rule of law was the leader of the loosely organised ‘Girondin’ group of deputies, Jacques Pierre Brissot. In this he was resisted by Maximilien Robespierre, who by a process of manipulation and intimidation dominated the Jacobin clubs and the Commune. Robespierre’s supporters were known as ‘the Mountain’, after the position they took in the new chamber in the Tuileries, on the benches high up against the wall. The majority of uncommitted deputies sat lower down, close to the debating floor, and thus became known as ‘the Plain’. Brissot and his allies had already made one attempt to rein in Robespierre, which failed when Marat brandished a pistol in the Convention chamber and melodramatically threatened to blow out his own brains.

On his first morning in the capital, after a disturbed night dreaming of the massacres, Wordsworth emerged onto the street to find hawkers selling copies of a speech denouncing Robespierre. In the Convention, Robespierre dared his opponents to identify themselves – and, after a silence, the Girondin journalist Louvet stepped forward to the tribune to accuse him, amongst other crimes, of encouraging the creation of a personality cult, and aspiring to a dictatorship.

In The Prelude, Wordsworth chose to dramatise this as a decisive scene in the Revolution, the moment when its future would be decided, for good or ill. He may have overestimated its significance – historians disagree on the subject – but there seems little reason to doubt his sincerity. It was clearly an important moment for him.* He bemoaned the fact that ‘Louvet was left alone without support/Of his irresolute friends’. Though ‘an insignificant stranger’, Wordsworth contemplated taking sides in this struggle:

Mean as I was, and little graced with powers

Of eloquence even in my native speech,

And all unfit for tumult and intrigue,

Yet would I willingly have taken up

A service at this time for cause so great,

However dangerous.³⁶

It was not unprecedented for an Englishman to engage in French politics. Tom Paine, for example, had been elected to the Convention after receiving a letter from the President of the Assembly announcing that ‘France calls you to its bosom,’ as well as invitations from no fewer than three different départements to stand as one of their deputies. In August the Assembly had conferred on Paine the title of ‘French citizen’.* It is possible that Wordsworth had already met Paine in 1791 through his publisher Joseph Johnson, the original publisher of Rights of Man; possible too that Wordsworth attended the dinner of expatriate Englishmen at White’s Hotel in Paris on 18 November, at which Paine was toasted and diners offered their ‘fraternal homage’ to the new Republic. Ten days later, a delegation from the Society for Constitutional Information in London presented a congratulatory address to the Convention. In response, Grégoire evoked the memory of the English revolutionaries of the 1640s. ‘The moment is at hand,’ he declared, ‘when the French Nation will send its own congratulations to the National Convention of Great Britain.’³⁷

Nearly fifty years afterwards, an elderly Wordsworth chucklingly confessed that he had been ‘pretty hot in it’ while in Paris, but what he meant by this is unclear. In a letter to his brother Richard written soon after his first visit to the French capital, he had referred to an unnamed member who had introduced him to the Assembly, ‘of whose acquaintance I shall profit on my return to Paris’.³⁸ This was probably Brissot. Thomas De Quincey, who first met Wordsworth in 1807 and whose source was likely to have been Wordsworth himself, recorded that Wordsworth ‘had been sufficiently connected with public men to have drawn upon himself some notice from those who afterwards composed the Committee of Public Safety’, i.e. Robespierre and his associates. He implied that Wordsworth had been prominent enough to be in danger had he remained longer in France.³⁹ In The Prelude Wordsworth would later suggest that had he stayed in Paris he ‘doubtless should have made a common cause/with some who perished’ – and maybe would have perished himself.⁴⁰

As well as Brissot, Wordsworth knew at least one other prominent Girondin deputy, the journalist Jean-Antoine Gorsas. Moreover, he was familiar with and may have known Grégoire, who in September had returned to Paris from Blois to sit in the Convention as deputy for Loir-et-Cher. It was Grégoire who had proposed the motion to abolish the monarchy, initiating the Republic. On 16 November he would be elected President of the Convention.

Robespierre replied to the charges against him in a speech to the Convention a week later. It was delivered in his usual style: self-dramatising, paranoid, brimming with righteous indignation. Far from seeking power for himself, he claimed to be no more than a repository of Historical Truth. He defended the recent violence, and dismissed the charges of illegality, pointing out that the Revolution was from its outset ‘illegal’. To judge the Revolution by standards of conventional morality was to rob the people’s uprising of its natural legitimacy. He concluded with a rhetorical flourish: ‘Do you want a Revolution without a revolution?’⁴¹

The speech carried the Convention; his accusers melted under the heat of Robespierre’s high-minded rhetoric. He now turned his attention to the fate of the King, demanding that he should face trial. Robespierre’s protégé, the young fanatic Louis-Antoine Saint-Just, went further: he asserted that a trial was unnecessary, because Louis was by definition guilty: ‘one cannot reign innocently’. There was only one possible solution: the surgical removal of this excrescence from the body of the nation.

Another prominent deputy, the Minister of the Interior Jean Marie Roland, announced the discovery amongst the King’s belongings of an iron chest filled with papers, apparently incriminating not just the King himself, but also some of the more moderate deputies. Those trying to defend the King were now on the defensive, fearful that they might in turn come under attack. A number chose to abandon Louis in order to protect themselves.

Early in December the Convention ended its discussion on the principle of trying the King and ordered an indictment to be prepared. On the eleventh Louis was brought before the Convention to answer the charge of fomenting counter-revolution. His replies, though dignified, were unconvincing.

Wordsworth had planned to be back in London during the month of October.⁴² He had two poems ready for publication, and a woman in an advanced state of pregnancy who needed his support. But he lingered a month or more in Paris, no doubt fascinated to be on hand while the future of the world was being decided. It seems that he may have attended some of the debates in the Convention as a spectator. Two years earlier he had been unwilling to make a small detour to come to Paris; now he was unable to drag himself away. At last, he returned reluctantly to England,

Compelled by nothing less than absolute want

Of funds for my support.⁴³

* This is a low estimate. They travelled about two thousand miles in all, but some of the journey was by boat.

* The term came into usage around 1800.

† Coach travel cost 2d or 3d per mile, a prohibitive expense for all but the wealthy.

* It seems likely to have been on this trip that Wordsworth visited the celebrated travel writer Thomas Pennant, whose Tour in Scotland had stimulated Johnson and Boswell to make their journey to the Western Isles.

* Generally known as such after the place where members of the club met in the rue St Jacques. Their official name was the Society of the Friends of the Revolution.

* Until the Revolution, commissions in the army had been reserved for scions of families whose aristocratic lineage went back at least four generations.

* Confusion is caused by the term ‘aristocrat’. The French noblesse was not the same as the English aristocracy: even allowing for the difference in population size, they were far more numerous – perhaps a quarter of a million people, compared to the 10,000 or so in Britain. By no means all ‘aristocrats’ were wealthy, despite occupying a privileged position under the ancien régime. It was not unknown for a French ‘aristocrat’ to push his own plough. In Britain, the term ‘aristocrat’ had a political as well as a social meaning; it was used as shorthand to denote anyone opposed to reform; while a ‘democrat’ was defined as one who demanded radical changes to the constitution, together with an immediate peace with France and recognition of the French Republic.

† His MPs were known as ‘Lonsdale’s ninepins’

* Lonsdale was Sir James Lowther until ennobled in 1784.

* Commissioned by the Jacobin Club but never completed (in part because of the need for constant changes; some of those who had been present became personae non gratae, and thus had to be excluded, while others, who had not, now wished to be included): existing only in the form of David’s preliminary (but detailed) sketches, some of which portray the assembled oath-swearers as classically severe nudes.

* It may be significant that Louvet had been elected to the Convention to represent the Loiret, the département in which Wordsworth had been living; perhaps this fact contributed to Wordsworths interest in him

* Joseph Priestley was made a citizen of France in September. He too was elected to the Convention, but declined the election.

2 REACTION

Wordsworth arrived in England in December 1792 overflowing with love for humanity, only to find the majority of his fellow countrymen suspicious or even belligerent. Recent events in France had thoroughly alarmed conservative opinion in Britain. It was one thing to limit the powers of the monarchy: quite another to abolish the monarchy altogether. With each passing week came news of further excesses; émigrés arrived by the boatload on British shores, every one bringing stories of fresh outrages. In its anxiety to avoid war, Pitt’s government had striven to remain neutral towards Revolutionary France, while stifling radical agitation at home. On 21 May 1792 a Royal Proclamation had been issued, encouraging magistrates to be more vigorous in controlling riotous meetings and seditious writings. Not much had ensued at the time, beyond a decision (perhaps taken beforehand) to prosecute Paine.

Meanwhile the victorious French armies had continued their advance, carrying all before them. The Prussians were driven back across the Rhine, and in November the French occupied Belgium, while in the south Savoy was annexed. On 19 November the Convention promised ‘fraternity and assistance’ to ‘all those wishing to recover their liberty’. The war changed its character: it was no longer a defence of the Republic, but a war of liberation. In the Convention Brissot declared, ‘We cannot relax until all Europe is in flames.’

The Convention’s threat to export the Revolution prompted Pitt to act, beginning a succession of prosecutions of radical authors, printers and publishers. At the same time the government released a flood of crude anti-French, pro-monarchist propaganda. Stories spread of plots, of insurrection, of traitors in our midst. Spies, informers and agents provocateurs proliferated. Support for the Revolution was portrayed as unpatriotic. It was not difficult to stir up popular sentiment against France, nor against those who appeared to side with the Old Enemy. Dissenters were especially vulnerable. By this time religious dissent and political radicalism had become synonymous; it was easy to portray prominent dissenters as pro-French Revolutionary conspirators. There had already been an ominous indication of what could happen if the crude prejudices of the people were inflamed. Back in 1791, a dinner in Birmingham to celebrate the second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille had provoked three days of rioting. Though the mob chanted ‘No Popery’ (as well as the inevitable ‘Church and King’), its victims were mainly prosperous dissenters with progressive views, most prominently Joseph Priestley, whose house (including his precious library) and laboratory were burned to the ground.

Britons were encouraged to draw up loyal addresses to George III. Those who declined to add their signatures were deemed to be suspect. Loyalists powdered their hair in the traditional style, while radicals let it hang loose in the ‘French’ fashion. Inns displayed gilt signs: ‘No JACOBINS ADMITTED HERE’. In November the MP John Reeves founded an anti-Jacobin association, and branches sprang up around the country, a counter-revolutionary equivalent to the Jacobin clubs. A month later Reeves founded an Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, which met fortnightly at the Crown and Anchor tavern in The Strand. Burke proposed the toast: ‘Old England against new France’.

A further Royal Proclamation on 1 December 1792 summoned the militia to suppress ‘seditious activities’. Parliament was recalled to combat the threat of insurrection. In the House of Commons, Fox attempted to calm exaggerated fears:

An insurrection! Where is it? Where has it reared its head! Good God! An insurrection in Great Britain! No wonder the militia were called out, and parliament assembled in the extraordinary way in which they have been. But where is it?¹

But his ironic words were scarcely heard in the storm of panic sweeping across the country. Fox’s allies began to desert him, going over to the ministry one by one, until eventually he would be left with only a rump of loyal supporters, too small to be able to make any serious challenge in Parliament.

The case against Paine had come to court in June, only to be adjourned. It was widely rumoured that the Attorney-General was reluctant to proceed to trial because he did not approve of the prosecution (a charge he denied). But the government’s own propaganda created pressure to make an example of Paine. He was dogged by government hirelings who hissed and hooted at him on every public occasion. Pillars of the community demonstrated their loyalty by burning his book in public.

Paine was among well-wishers at Joseph Johnson’s house in St Paul’s Churchyard one evening when another radical, the poet William Blake, warned him not to go home; a warrant had been issued for his arrest. Paine left that night for Dover. Within days he had taken up his seat in the Convention. On 18 December he was tried in absentia, and after being found guilty by a packed jury, was declared an outlaw.* Demonstrations against him were promoted around the country. His effigy was burned, shot at, hanged, and pounded to smithereens with a sledgehammer. According to the undergraduate Samuel Taylor Coleridge, then making a rare visit to his home town of Ottery St Mary, the locals were very disappointed that Paine had not been ‘cut to pieces at Canterbury’.

Such was the atmosphere when Wordsworth returned to England: a dismaying contrast with the mood in France – and about to become much worse. On 21 January 1793 the former King of France went to the guillotine. The news horrified the British public. (In the Convention, Paine had tried to argue against the execution, only to be shouted down by Marat.) Radicals were already divided in their responses to the developing situation in France, and on the defensive against the new programme of government repression. Now public opinion hardened against them. Just as the radical cause in Britain had been boosted by the outbreak of the Revolution, so it was undermined by the killing of the King.

John Frost, secretary of the Corresponding Society, was among the country’s most prominent radicals. He had been one of the pair of delegates sent to Paris by the Society for Constitutional Information to assure the French Convention that the British people would never support a war against liberty. In this capacity he had been present at Louis XVI’s trial, and as a result he had been denounced by Burke as ‘the ambassador to the murderers’. Early in 1793 Frost was arrested on a charge of sedition, on the basis of an alleged conversation in Percy’s coffee house, Marylebone; he was supposed to have declared that he wanted ‘no king in England’, and that ‘the constitution of this country is a bad one’. (It seems that he was drunk at the time.) On these flimsy grounds Frost was struck off the attorney’s roll, imprisoned for six months, required to provide £500 as a surety of good behaviour for five years or face prolonged imprisonment until he did so, and made to stand in the pillory for an hour. (The latter was no small punishment; men had been mutilated or even killed as a result of blows received in the pillory.) Frost’s was one of a number of prosecutions for sedition promoted by the government in the spring of 1793 in an attempt to intimidate radicals.

On 29 January Wordsworth’s poems ‘An Evening Walk’ and ‘Descriptive Sketches’ were published by Joseph Johnson in two quarto volumes. If not quite his first appearance in print – a poem of his had been published in the European Magazine – these were, at the very least, an attempt to prove himself: ‘as I had done nothing by which to distinguish myself at the university, I thought these little things might shew that I could do something’.² But his hopes fell flat. Reviews were cool and sales were slow. Given the timing, that was hardly surprising. Three days after the poems were published, France declared war on Britain. ‘Descriptive Sketches’, which concluded in a hymn of praise to the new Republic, could scarcely have appeared at a less propitious moment.

The coming of war increased Wordsworth’s sense of alienation. He loved his country deeply; and hated what his country was doing. For him, Revolutionary France was the hope of Mankind; now his own kin made war on her, in unholy alliance with the despotic emperors of central Europe. Even now these tyrants were carving up Poland between them, crudely annexing the territory of a free people. Wordsworth secretly rejoiced at news of British defeats, and in church sat silent among the congregation, ‘like an uninvited guest’, while prayers were offered up for British victories.

Oh, much have they to account for, who could tear

By violence at one decisive rent

From the best youth in England their dear pride,

Their joy, in England … ³

In France, Wordsworth had come to feel himself a patriot; in England he was made to feel a traitor. Moreover, war with France divided him from his mistress and his daughter, born in December and baptised in the cathedral at Orléans. It was, as he recognised, a profound shock to his moral nature:

… I felt

The ravage of this most unnatural strife

In my own heart; there lay it like a weight

At enmity with all the tenderest springs

Of my enjoyments. I, who with the breeze

Had played, a green leaf on the blessed tree

Of my beloved country – nor had wished

For happier fortune than to wither there –

Now from my pleasant station was cut off,

And tossed about in whirlwinds … ⁴

Since his return from France Wordsworth had been lodging with his elder brother Richard, a lawyer in Staple Inn.* According to De Quincey, his companions were forced to play cards with him every night, ‘as the best mode of beguiling his sense of distress’. Disaffected and resentful, he was indignant to read the strictures on the French Revolution by Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff. The Bishop’s remarks were written in response to the execution of Louis XVI, and rushed into print a few days afterwards as an appendix to a sermon delivered eight years earlier. The very title of the original sermon was provocative: ‘The Wisdom and Goodness of God in having made both Rich and Poor’. It was hard to take such stuff from anyone, least of all from a man renowned for his venality. But it was the new appendix that especially infuriated Wordsworth. Watson commended the British government’s measures against radicals, ‘the flagitious dregs of a nation’. When the Revolution began, Watson had given his ‘hearty approbation’ to the French attempts to free themselves from arbitrary power, just as he had sided with the American colonists – but recent developments in France had caused him to ‘fly with terror and abhorrence from the altar of liberty’. Pitt’s administration was right not to tolerate the ‘wild fancies and turbulent tempers of discontented or ill-informed individuals’. The British constitution might not be perfect, but it already provided as much liberty and equality as was desirable, and was far too excellent to be amended by ‘peasants and mechanics’. British courts were impartial and incorrupt; parliamentary reform was unnecessary; provision for the poor in Britain was so liberal as to discourage industry. ‘Look round the globe,’ urged Watson complacently, ‘and see if you can discover a single nation on all its surface so powerful, so rich, so beneficial, so free and happy as our own.’

Such opinions were not uncommon. The Scottish Lord Justice Clerk, Lord Braxfield, for example, held that the British constitution was perfect; and therefore that anyone proposing any change was prima facie guilty of sedition. But Watson’s words particularly irritated Wordsworth. Maybe it was because he read them at an especially vulnerable moment. And maybe it was the author himself, as much as what he wrote, that irritated him. Wordsworth and Watson had much in common. Like Wordsworth, Watson came from the Lakes, and indeed lived there still, on the banks of Windermere (far from Llandaff). Like Wordsworth, Watson was a Cambridge man. Until now he had been known as a levelling prelate, the Bishop of dissenters – which rendered his defection more grievous. He had risen from modest origins, a fact that made his condescending attitude to the poor even more unforgivable.

Wordsworth wrote a furious retort, which he entitled ‘A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff, on the Extraordinary Avowal of his Political Principles’. He defended the killings in France, including the execution of the King, as ‘a convulsion from which is to spring a fairer order of things’. Contrasting the Bishop of Llandaff with the Bishop of Blois, he quoted Grégoire’s words at the opening of the Convention, and repeatedly stressed the unanimity of twenty-five million Frenchmen as in itself legitimising acts carried out in their name. Declaring himself to be ‘an advocate of republicanism’, he argued the necessity of abolishing not just the monarchy, but the aristocracy too. This system of ‘fictitious superiority’ produced idleness, corruption, hypocrisy, sycophancy, pride and luxury. Poverty bred misery, promiscuity and prostitution. Britons were like slaves:

We are taught from infancy that we were born in a state of inferiority to our oppressors, that they were sent into the world to scourge and we to be scourged. Accordingly we see the bulk of mankind actuated by these fatal prejudices, even more ready to lay themselves under the feet of the great, than the great are to trample upon them.

Wordsworth’s use of the first person plural identified him with the oppressed, the ‘swinish multitude’ of Burke’s notorious sneer. ‘Redress is in our power’ – but the popular mind had been ‘debauched’.

Left to the quiet exercise of their own judgment do you think the people would have thought it necessary to set fire to the house of the philosophic Priestley, and to hunt down his life like that of a traitor or a parricide; – that, deprived almost of the necessaries of existence by the burden of their taxes, they would cry out as with one voice for a war from which not a single ray of consolation can visit them to compensate for the additional keenness with which they are about to smart under the scourge of labour, of cold, and of hunger?

Wordsworth deplored the ‘infatuation with war, ‘which is now giving up to the sword so large a portion of the poor and consigning the rest to the more slow and painful consumption of want’. Drawing on his own experience of the Lonsdale lawsuit, he condemned ‘the thorny labyrinth of litigation’, ‘the consuming expense of our never-ending process, the verbosity of unintelligible statutes, and the perpetual contrariety in our judicial decisions’. In a bitterly sarcastic finale he thanked the Bishop for his ‘desertion’ from the friends of liberty, ‘conscious that an enemy lurking in our ranks is ten times more formidable than when drawn out against us’.⁵*

Wordsworth’s arguments were made with passionate fervour. In them one can trace the influence of the seventeenth-century Puritans, republican writers like Sidney, Marvell and Harrington, as well as that of Paine and the French orators whose debates he had heard so recently.⁶ But primarily this was a very personal piece of writing, the fierce heat of the author’s emotions blazing on the page. It is beyond question that Wordsworth wanted to blast Watson. Yet his diatribe was not published. Why not?

It is suggestive that the surviving manuscript of the ‘Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff’ is not in Wordsworth’s hand. Perhaps he had a fair copy made as a first step towards publication, and then something prevented him from proceeding? It may have been difficult to find a publisher willing to risk publishing such an intemperate pamphlet in such a combustible climate. There was also a considerable risk to Wordsworth himself, even if he published it anonymously. To sign yourself ‘a Republican’ at such a moment, as Wordsworth had done, was provocative; it implied approval of Louis’s execution. ‘The very term is become one of the most opprobrious in the English Language,’ Priestley was quoted as saying in February 1793. The author of such a pamphlet would be notorious if identified; he might well face prosecution, like Frost; he could certainly abandon any hopes he might still cherish of preferment in the Church, or in any other profession. Some years later Gilbert Wakefield would be sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for writing what was deemed to be a seditious pamphlet,* in response to another effusion of Watson’s. Wordsworth’s elder brother may have urged him to suppress the work. Perhaps prudence triumphed over passion.

Whatever happened, the letter to the Bishop did not appear in print. Wordsworth remained angry and frustrated.

If Wordsworth had been in any doubt about the risks of publishing his ‘Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff’ at such a time, he needed to look no further than his old university, where proceedings were beginning against William Frend, a Fellow of Jesus College, for publishing what was in most ways a much more innocuous pamphlet. Its title, Peace and Union,† does not sound particularly provocative. But early in 1793 ‘peace’ was a dirty word.

Cambridge attitudes to the Revolution reflected those of the country as a whole. The university had welcomed its early manifestations; there had been a proposal to hold an annual dinner to mark the fall of the Bastille. The young men were encouraged to write on the subject. In September 1790 one of them delivered a prize-winning speech in Trinity College chapel in memory of William III, hero of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, making an explicit comparison with recent events in France: ‘Liberty has begun her progress, and hope tells us, that she has only begun.’⁷

Subsequent developments across the Channel had divided opinion in Cambridge, as they had divided opinion everywhere. Many of the older men recoiled from the violent disturbances that ensued as the French authorities lost control of events. In the summer of 1792 they signalled their feelings by sending a loyal address to King George. But not all of them concurred. Radicals and reformists sympathetic to the revolutionaries constituted an intellectually active minority within the university, centred on Frend’s college, Jesus. Many of these were more or less openly nonconformist (particularly Unitarian). Though in theory it was impossible to take a degree or to obtain a college Fellowship without subscribing to the Thirty-Nine Articles (the measure of conformity to the Church of England), in practice there was a degree of toleration. Nonconformists were not permitted to teach, but they were usually allowed to retain their Fellowships and to reside in college.

Among the undergraduates, the developing Revolution stimulated impassioned debate. Younger men were much more open to change, much less wary of turmoil. Some zealots relished Revolutionary violence as a necessary purge; others justified it in the service of a greater good. Revolutionary rhetoric made a compelling appeal to the young; the high ideals of the revolutionaries contrasted strongly with the cynical corruption omnipresent in British society. The Revolution stressed abstract virtues: liberty, fraternity and equality. Its reactionary opponents seemed negative in their reliance on tradition, caution and stability. The revolutionaries believed in the nobility of man – though not of course in that of certain criminal individuals – and what young person does not believe in the nobility of man? The Revolution was the future, or so it seemed. To the intellectually curious, this experiment in humanity could not but be fascinating.

Moreover, it was hard not to feel moved by the events in France. Who could fail to be stirred by the heroic defence of the Republic against seemingly insuperable odds? Professional armies of mercenaries had been beaten back by untrained boys. In Paris, barely-armed citizens, men and women alike, had prevailed time and again against the organised musketry of soldiers. The Convention itself was a theatre, its theme the fate of mankind, its principals men like Marat and Robespierre, distinguished not by the pedigree of their bloodlines but by their strength of character, their courage, their conviction, their purity.

As tension increased between Britain and France, so divisions at home became deeper and the debate more heated. In Cambridge, as in the rest of the country, positions were hardening. There were riots in the city that winter: a dissenters’ meeting house and several shops were attacked. Tom Paine was burned in effigy on the last day of 1792. A hundred and twelve local publicans solemnly pledged to report to the magistrates treasonable or seditious conversations, books, or pamphlets. Nonetheless, ‘pamphlets swarmed from the press’. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was then in his second year at Jesus, and according to his fellow undergraduate and former schoolmate Charles Valentine Le Grice, his room was ‘the constant rendezvous of conversation-loving friends’. There was no need for the other undergraduates to read the latest pamphlets, because Coleridge had read them all on the morning they appeared; ‘and in the evening, with our negus,* we had them viva voce gloriously’.⁸

One such pamphlet was Fox’s Letter to the Westminster Electors, which followed the line he had taken in Parliament in attempting to soothe the ‘false alarm’ raging in the country. Fox believed the government to be deliberately stirring up animosity towards reformists and dissenters, using rumour and hearsay in support of its repressive policies. Evidently Coleridge was sympathetic to Fox’s views. ‘Have you read Mr Fox’s letter to the Westminster Electors?’ he wrote to his sweetheart, Mary Evans. ‘It is quite the political Go at Cambridge, and has converted many souls to the Foxite faith.’ He signed his letter ‘with the ardour of fraternal friendship’.⁹

William Frend’s Peace and Union appeared a few days later. Frend lamented the fact that Britain was on the brink of war, a war against the friends of mankind. He aimed to reconcile the ‘contending parties’, the advocates of a republic and the defenders of the constitution. Britain was split into two camps, he wrote: ‘the minds of men are at present greatly agitated; and the utmost rigour of government, aided by the exertions of every lover of his country, is necessary to preserve us, from falling into all the horrors attendant on civil commotions’. As a prominent dissenter, Frend had good reason to fear public disorder. He had already suffered at the hands of the mob, when the manuscript of a book on which he had been collaborating with Joseph Priestley was burned during the 1791 Birmingham riots. He was horrified by the ‘assassinations, murders, massacres, burning of houses, plundering of property, [and] open violations of justice’ which had marked the progress of the French Revolution. For him, the moral to be drawn from these events was clear: that abuses and grievances should be corrected as soon as they were known. ‘Had the French monarch seasonably given up some useless prerogatives, he might still have worn the crown; had the nobility consented to relinquish those noble privileges, which were designed only for barbarous ages, they might have retained their titles; could the clergy have submitted to be citizens, they might still have been in possession of wealth and influence.’ To prevent similar upheaval here in Britain, argued Frend, parliamentary reform was essential.¹⁰

Though this might seem reasonable enough, the university authorities decided otherwise. The Master and Fellows of Jesus College passed resolutions condemning Frend, and initiated proceedings that would lead to his expulsion from the college and ultimate banishment from the city. The case provoked letters to the papers in Frend’s defence, and he attracted plenty of undergraduate support: slogans such as ‘Frend and Liberty!’ or ‘Frend for Ever!!’ were chalked or daubed on college walls, and even etched in gunpowder on the lawn of Trinity College quadrangle.

Frend’s prosecution could be explained only in terms of the polarised politics of the moment. Though his pamphlet expressed opinions that would have upset many of his colleagues – defending the execution of Louis XVI and opposing the war with France – these could hardly be described as seditious. The Vice-Chancellor virtually admitted that the trial had been a political one when he later asserted that the expulsion of Frend had been ‘the ruin of the Jacobinical party as a University thing’. That this was no isolated event became obvious in the late summer, with the trials of several Scottish radicals. One of these, the Reverend Thomas Fyshe Palmer, a Unitarian minister and a former Fellow of Queen’s College, was sentenced to seven years’ transportation, his crime’ being to have corrected the proofs of a handbill written by a Dundee weaver (deemed to be seditious). Things had come to a pretty pass when former Cambridge Fellows were being shipped off in fetters to Australia.

Frend’s trial in the university court began on 3 May 1793, frequently interrupted by (in the Vice-Chancellor’s words) ‘noisy and tumultuous irregularities of conduct’ from the undergraduates who filled the public gallery, applauding the defendant and heckling his accusers. The university authorities attempted to suppress the rowdiness, and after he had called the Vice-Chancellor’s attention to one young man ostentatiously clapping, the Senior Proctor was given permission to make an arrest. The Proctor hurried into the gallery to seize the miscreant, but too late; the culprit had fled. The young protestor was later identified as ‘S.T. Coleridge, of Jesus College’.

A contemporary report in the Morning Chronicle had the Proctor apprehend the wrong man, who, on being accused of clapping, demonstrated that a deformed arm made him incapable of doing so, producing a barrage of ironic applause from the other undergraduates. (Coleridge himself may have been the source of this anecdote. In an account he gave many years later, the young man arrested had an iron hook instead of a hand. This sounds like a story that improved with age.)

Coleridge escaped with a reprimand, though he seems to have been prominent (if not conspicuous) among Frend’s undergraduate supporters. He had known and admired Frend for the past year and a half, and had absorbed many of his ideas. ‘Mr Frend’s company is by no means invidious,’ he had written teasingly to his elder brother George¹¹ – a cautious, caring, respectable person, who had no doubt expressed some concern at Sam’s association with such a prominent dissenter. George stood as unofficial guardian to his baby brother, and had done so since the death of their father in 1781. Coleridge often described George – the most scholarly of his siblings – as a kind of father, though George was only eight years his senior. ‘You have always been a brother to me in kindness and a father in wisdom,’ he wrote to George late in 1792.¹²

Coleridge was then just twenty (two years younger than Wordsworth), loose-limbed and scruffy, ‘a very gentle Bear’ with long curling black hair, fleshy lips, dark heavy eyebrows and large blue eyes, sometimes distant, sometimes burning with impatient energy. (He believed himself to be ugly, and referred to the ‘fat vacuity’ of his face.¹³) He had gone up to Cambridge in October 1791, some ten months after Wordsworth left. A child prodigy, Coleridge promised greatness. At the age of three he could read a chapter in the Bible. He read every book that came his way, and showed astonishing retentive power, being able to recite large chunks of any work after only one reading. At school he soon outstripped all the other boys. The youngest of ten children (one of whom died in infancy), he was the favourite of the family. ‘My Father was very fond of me, and I was my mother’s darling,’ he wrote in retrospect; ‘in consequence, I was very miserable.’ His brother Frank, the next youngest, was jealous of this attention. He had one sister, Anne (known as Nancy), five years older, who petted him and became his confidante, listening to his ‘puny sorrows’ and ‘hidden maladies’. Maybe he was a spoiled child; he certainly seems to have been wilful:

… I became a dreamer – and acquired an indisposition to all bodily activity – and I was fretful, and inordinately passionate, and as I could not play at any thing, and was slothful, I was despised & hated by the boys; and because I could read & spell, & had, I may truly say, a memory & understanding forced into almost an unnatural ripeness, I was flattered & wondered at by all the old women – & so I became very vain, and despised most of the boys, that were at all near my own age – and before I was eight years old, I was a character … ¹⁴

His father, the Reverend John Coleridge, was both vicar of the Devon town where the family lived, Ottery St Mary, and headmaster of the local school. He was a gentle and learned man, absent-minded and unworldly, with several obscure publications to his name. Coleridge remembered that his father ‘used to take me on his knee, and hold long conversations with me’.¹⁵ But John Coleridge was already fifty-three when his youngest child was born, and he died suddenly a few weeks before Sam’s ninth birthday. The family was now in difficult circumstances. Soon afterwards Coleridge was sent away to a charitable boarding school, Christ’s Hospital in London, from which it seems that he rarely returned home to Ottery. This felt to him like a rejection, and afterwards he never showed any affection towards his mother. ‘Boy! the School is your father! The School is your mother!’ bellowed his headmaster William Bowyer as he flogged the tearful child.

Coleridge’s brilliance earned him the status and privileges of a ‘Grecian’, a pupil destined for Oxford or Cambridge who wore a special uniform to distinguish him from the ordinary ‘blue-coat boys’. He won his place at Jesus in a blaze of honours. It was assumed that he was headed for the Church. A glorious career was in prospect; he might become a bishop, or perhaps headmaster of one of the great public schools.*

He read voraciously; years later he told his first biographer, James Gillman, that at fourteen, ‘My whole being was, with eyes closed to every object of present sense, to crumple myself up in a sunny corner and read, read, read.’ When an older schoolboy gave him a volume of William Lisle Bowles’s evocative and melancholy sonnets, Coleridge was so entranced that he painstakingly wrote out forty copies for distribution to friends. Bowles’s verse became a model for his own work, and Bowles himself a master whom the young Coleridge revered. When he later happened to see Bowles crossing the marketplace in Salisbury, Coleridge was too shy to speak to him.

Every schoolboy of this era was expected to write verse, both for its own sake and as an exercise in the study of Latin and Greek, translating classical originals into English. Coleridge’s early poetry was conventional stuff. It followed the classical models predominant in eighteenth-century verse, written in a convoluted ‘poetic’ diction that would soon come to be seen as artificial, characterised by elaborate abstractions far removed from everyday experience. The effect was strained, even turgid. Tired metaphors and phrases clogged up the lines. There was an excess of ornamentation, with too many double epithets. Bowyer tried to counter this tendency, to instil a bias towards the plainest form of words. He had a list of forbidden introductions, similes and expressions. ‘Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, Muse? Your Nurse’s daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? Oh, aye the cloister-pump, I suppose!’

One of Coleridge’s earliest poems was his ‘Monody on the Death of Chatterton’. Like Coleridge, Thomas Chatterton had been a blue-coat boy, the orphaned son of a Bristol schoolmaster, a precocious poet who at the age of sixteen claimed to have discovered a chestful of poems, letters and other documents written by a fifteenth-century monk, Thomas Rowley. Though these aroused interest and indeed excitement, Chatterton failed to prosper by them, and at the age of only eighteen, alone in a London garret, he committed suicide, driven by poverty to despair. The tragic story of neglected genius cut off at such an early age caught the imagination of young men everywhere, and Coleridge was one of many who identified powerfully with him, ominously heading his poem ‘A Monody on Chatterton, who poisoned himself at the age of eighteen – written by the author at the age of sixteen’.

In his last year at school Coleridge was confined for long months to the Christ’s Hospital sanatorium, lying in bed while hearing the boys outside laugh and play. He had become seriously ill after swimming fully clothed in the nearby New River, and afterwards wearing his wet clothes as they slowly dried on his back. Unsurprisingly he developed a fever, complicated by jaundice, no doubt as a result of the foul water in which he had immersed himself. His friend and first biographer James Gillman believed that all his future bodily sufferings could be dated from this episode.* Coleridge was a young man of enormous energy and robust vitality, yet he succumbed to recurrent attacks of illness. There was also a lasting psychological effect of this long period of convalescence. In the school sanatorium his nurse’s daughter, Jenny Edwards, helped to care for him, and he developed sentimental feelings for her; as he recovered he wrote a sonnet in her honour – which adds piquancy to Bowyer’s reported jibe about his ‘Muse’:

Fair as the bosom of the Swan

That rises graceful o’er the wave,

I’ve seen thy breast with pity heave,

And therefore love I thee, sweet Genevieve!

Forever after, Coleridge would derive a perverse erotic satisfaction from being helpless in the care of a desirable woman.

While ill he was regularly dosed with laudanum,* then prescribed as a panacea. Not only did opium relieve pain; it prompted delicious dreams that soothed the mind of the fevered boy. In future he was to resort to its use whenever he felt ill, or under pressure.

During his last year at Christ’s Hospital, Coleridge received news that his ‘sweet sister’ had died of consumption. By this time four of his brothers were already dead. Four remained, three of them much older than him. Frank (the nearest in age) had already gone away to sea, and subsequently joined the army in India. A year later he too would be dead, after receiving a wound during the siege of Seringapatam. This left the young Coleridge isolated, with no siblings near to him in age – but he found a surrogate family in the widowed mother and three sisters of a schoolmate, Tom Evans. They lived in Villiers Street, not far from the school, and Coleridge spent his Saturdays there. The Evans women provided substitute sisters and a substitute mother, whom he hoped would love him and be amused by his antics. By the time he left for Cambridge he believed himself in love with the eldest girl, Mary, though he was too shy to declare himself. Instead he wrote them all (including the mother) jokey, flirtatious letters. After his first university term he returned to them for Christmas in a poor state of health, and Mrs Evans nursed him tenderly. ‘Believe me, that You and my Sisters have the very first row in the front box of my Heart’s little theatre,’ he wrote to her afterwards, ‘and – God knows! you are not crowded.’¹⁷

In his first year at Cambridge Coleridge distinguished himself by winning a prize for a Greek ode on the then topical subject of the slave trade.* At the end of 1792 he narrowly failed to win a university scholarship, reaching the shortlist of four. Perhaps it was not surprising that he failed, given that for the six weeks preceding the examination – so he later said – he was almost constantly intoxicated. By this time he had acquired a reputation within Cambridge for his excellent classical scholarship, poetical language, and ‘a peculiar style of conversation’ – perhaps a euphemism, since Coleridge was always more inclined to talk than to listen.¹⁸ ‘He was very studious,’ recalled Valentine Le Grice, ‘but his reading was desultory and capricious.’¹⁹ Coleridge himself claimed to have been ‘a proverb to the University for Idleness’.²⁰

He was also hopeless with money. Perhaps this judgement is harsh, because he never had a lot to spend, and was disappointed by his failure to win a scholarship. An annual income of almost £100 from a Christ’s Hospital exhibition and two university awards, together with the odd handout from his brothers, should have been enough to keep him, however. But he seemed incapable of living within his means. On his arrival at Cambridge he rashly gave an upholsterer carte blanche to redecorate his rooms, and was then ‘stupefied’ by the size of the bill. Soon he was drinking heavily, and he seems to have resumed taking opium, ‘building magnificent edifices of happiness on some fleeting shadow of reality’ in ‘soul-enervating reveries’. He often stole away to London, where there were plenty of temptations to empty his purse. Early in 1793 he wrote to his brother George summarising the state of his finances. He outlined his plans for a book of translations of ‘the best Lyric poems from the Greek, and the modern Latin writers’ – the first of many unrealised schemes. By raising two hundred subscriptions to this work, he felt that he would be able to pay off his debts, ‘which have corroded my Spirits greatly for some time Past’. He reckoned them at £58. Though George sent him some money, he was soon behind again. By the end of his second year at Cambridge he had somehow managed to run up further debts, which he now calculated, with misleading precision, at £148.17s.1¼d. He returned to Devon and presented himself before his older brothers with some trepidation. ‘I am fearful, that your Silence proceeds from Displeasure – If so, what is left for me to do – but to grieve? The Past is not in my Power – for the follies, of which I may have been guilty, I have been greatly disquieted – and I trust, the Memory of them will operate to future consistency of Conduct.’²¹

Coleridge’s brothers provided him with a sum to stave off his creditors, but he quickly frittered away much of this, loitering ten days in Tiverton to conduct a flirtation with Miss Fanny Nesbitt, ‘a very pretty girl’ he met on the coach. Rather than returning directly to Cambridge, he lingered in London in order to be near Mary Evans. While walking between a tavern and a shop where he went to purchase a lottery ticket, he composed a poem, ‘To Fortune’, which was published in the Morning Chronicle. On his arrival back in college he discovered further embarrassments, ‘which in my wild carelessness I had forgotten, and many of which I had contracted almost without knowing it’. Desperate, he fled back to London at eleven o’clock at night, where for three days he lived in a ‘tempest of pleasure’. He returned to Cambridge and stayed a week, then left again for London, by now in a state of delirium. ‘When Vice has not annihilated Sensibility, there is little need of a Hell!’²² There he seems to have contemplated suicide – but after a night in ‘a house of ill-fame’, ruminating in a chair, and an agitated morning walk in the park, he sought refuge instead in the bosom of the army, enlisting in the 15th Light Dragoons under the name Silas Tomkyn Comberbache.

Little is known of Wordsworth’s life in the period after his return from France at the end of 1792. For us this is a dark time – no letters of his survive written between September 1792, when he was still in Blois, and February 1794. Almost all that can be deduced of his activities during these lost seventeen months derives from incidental remarks in Dorothy’s letters to her friend Jane Pollard, or from The Prelude. Until the twentieth century only a handful of close family members knew of his involvement with Annette Vallon. But soon after the First World War, two letters from Annette that had been intercepted by the French police almost 130 years earlier surfaced in the Loir-et-Cher archives. Both were dated 20 March 1793. One was addressed to Dorothy, the other to ‘Williams’. Emotion overflows from both; they lack punctuation; the spelling is idiosyncratic and inconsistent. They read like the letters of a naïve young girl, not a woman of nearly twenty-seven. The content is in each case repetitive and confused. She swings one way and then the other, longing for him, yet fearing that he may be taken prisoner if he returns. It would comfort her, she writes, if he could come and give her the ‘glorious’ title of his wife, even if ‘cruel necessity’ would compel him to leave immediately. ‘Come, my love, my husband, and receive the tender embraces of your wife, of your daughter,’ she urges, apparently expecting his imminent arrival. Their child, now three months old and baptised ‘Anne-Caroline Wordswodsth’, she tells him, ‘grows more and more like you every day’. Holding her baby close enough to feel her heart beat, Annette imagines how it will stir when she says, ‘Caroline, in a month, in a fortnight, in a week, you are going to see the most beloved of men, the most tender of men.’ She ends by sending him a thousand kisses, ‘sur la bouche, sur les yeux et mon petit* que j’aime toujours, que je recomande bien a tes soins’. Mention of other letters shows that she and Wordsworth were in regular correspondence, and her letter to Dorothy (enclosed with the one to William) makes it obvious that he has confided in his sister; Annette has already received at least one welcoming letter from her, perhaps more. She writes of the time, a little further off, when the three of them will live together in ‘notre petit ménage’. As for Caroline, ‘My dear sister, you will be her second mother.’²³

It is not impossible that Wordsworth might have returned to France in 1793. Provision existed for non-combatants to travel between warring countries. The scientist Humphry Davy, for example, was invited to lecture in France at the height of the struggle between the two nations. Of course, there would have been difficulties, and this was a particularly hazardous time, the rule of law in France being so uncertain. Annette hoped that Wordsworth would return to legitimise their union, while acknowledging that it could be only a short visit; they would make a home together once the war was over. There was a widespread belief (which Annette shared) that it would not last long, now that the might of Great Britain had been added to that of the Continental Allies. France appeared to be in chaos, without an effective government while at war with almost all of Europe. After their initial successes, French armies were everywhere in retreat. The security of the young Republic was undermined by uprisings in several parts of the country in the spring of 1793, including a serious revolt in the Vendée.

These letters of Annette’s never reached Wordsworth or his sister, and there is no evidence to indicate whether Wordsworth did consider returning to France to marry her. According to Dorothy, he was then ‘looking out and wishing for the opportunity of engaging himself as Tutor to some young Gentleman’.²⁴ Early in July he set off on a tour of the West Country in the company of William Calvert, a friend from their days as fellow pupils at Hawkshead School. Calvert had become a man of property on the death of his father, and he offered to pay all their travelling expenses; since Wordsworth had nothing else to do, he accepted. They passed a month of ‘calm and glassy days’ on the Isle of Wight. In the evenings Wordsworth walked along the seashore, the prospect of the Channel fleet at Spithead preparing for sea always before him; as the sun set he would hear the evening cannon. But this magnificent sight only deepened his sense of isolation, symbolising as it did the division in his heart. He was full of melancholy and foreboding. He did not share the general confidence that the war would swiftly be brought to a successful conclusion. He had witnessed the spirit prevailing in France, and foresaw a long struggle ahead, ‘productive of distress and misery beyond all possible calculation’.²⁵

The French were dealing with the crisis in their own ruthless fashion. A decree was proclaimed condemning all rebels to summary execution; watch committees were set up in communes throughout the country; a Revolutionary tribunal was established to try traitors. In April a Committee of Public Safety with extraordinary powers came into being, which soon began to aggrandise all the powers of the executive. Later that summer a levée en masse would be declared, requiring all unmarried men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five to register for military service. The struggle for power between the Girondins and the Mountain reached its climax at the beginning of June: after the Convention was besieged by a huge and heavily armed mob, Brissot and the other Girondin leaders were expelled and placed under house arrest. One by one, the remaining uncommitted deputies fled Paris, leaving the Convention in the hands of the Mountain. The assassination of Marat on 13 July provided a pretext for further purges, consolidating the Jacobin hold on the machinery of government. A Law of Suspects ordered the immediate arrest of anybody against whom there was even a suspicion of political disloyalty. Emergency powers gave Revolutionary committees throughout France the power of life and death. The accused were tried and condemned in groups. Pity for the criminal was itself proof of treason. The pace of executions accelerated. The Terror had begun.

We can only speculate how much of this reached Wordsworth at the time, and how he reacted. Developments in France were reported in detail in the English newspapers; the war gave them added relevance. It is hard to imagine that he would not have followed the news from France closely. The eclipse of the Girondins must have affected him, especially as he was acquainted with some of those men now outlawed or imprisoned. On 13 July his Orléans landlord, M. Gellet-Duvivier, was guillotined; if Wordsworth heard about this, it would have seemed to him that the Terror was closing in. Annette’s family were (regrettably) royalists; would they be safe?* Already torn by a conflict of loyalties, Wordsworth had more and more reason to be anxious about the direction events were taking. He had given his heart to the Revolution; now perhaps he was beginning to experience the torment of doubt. Meanwhile change at home seemed further away than ever. The harsh sentences dealt to those convicted of sedition silenced reformers and radicals alike. Fear of prosecution deterred Wordsworth from expressing the emotion raging within him. It was understandable that he should seek to escape from his thoughts, to find relief

… by the sides

Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,

Wherever nature led; more like a man

Flying from something that he dreads, than one

Who sought the thing he loved …

Around the end of July Wordsworth and Calvert crossed from the Isle of Wight to the mainland, and continued in a whiskey (a form of open carriage) towards Salisbury, intending to go on in the same way towards Wales and then up along the border to Chester; but the horse drawing them ‘began to caper in a most dreadful manner’, and dragged them into a ditch, damaging the vehicle beyond repair. Though neither man was injured, a decision was taken not to continue together – most probably for practical reasons. Calvert may have given Wordsworth some money for his journey; he then mounted his horse and rode off into the north, leaving Wordsworth to proceed, as Dorothy put it, supported by his ‘firm friends, a pair of stout legs’. This unexpected parting turned out to be serendipitous, because the impressions Wordsworth received during the rest of the tour proved inspirational. On foot, and alone with his thoughts, he was more responsive to the landscape, and more open to encounters along the way.

His path took him along chalk tracks across the vast plateau of Salisbury Plain, the wind whistling through unending dreary fields of corn, crows eddying in the sky. It was a desolate place, with few trees or hedges to break the monotony; barely inhabited then, but pockmarked with prehistoric remains. As he walked, Wordsworth meditated on the savage past, and on the ‘calamities, principally consequent on war, to which, more than other classes of men, the poor are subject’. He imagined a vagrant ex-soldier, caught in the open as a storm began to sweep the Plain, seeking shelter from the driving rain and howling wind among the monoliths of Stonehenge. It is tempting to speculate that Wordsworth did the same, especially as contemporary records describe ‘a storm of extraordinary intensity [that] lashed southern England with hailstones as big as six inches round’.²⁶ But perhaps the temptation should be resisted, because in a letter written many years afterwards, Wordsworth recalled how ‘overcome with heat and fatigue I took my siesta among the Pillars of Stonehenge’, and complained jokingly that he ‘was not visited by the Muse in my Slumbers’.²⁷

If the muse left him alone on this occasion, she cannot have been far off, because another vision came to Wordsworth on the Plain, where relics of the distant past – standing stones, barrows, ancient tracks, stone circles, mounds and hill forts – are more evident than anywhere else in Britain. In The Prelude he tells us that

While through those vestiges of ancient times

I ranged, and by the solitude o’ercome,

I had a reverie and saw the past,

Saw multitudes of men, and here and there

A single Briton in his wolf-skin vest

With shield and stone-ax, stride across the wold;

The voice of spears was heard, the rattling spear

Shaken by arms of mighty bone, in strength

Long mouldered, of barbaric majesty.²⁸

Wordsworth goes on to describe a nightmare of darkness descending (perhaps a lowering storm?), a sacrificial altar lit by dismal flames, and the groans of those waiting to die; followed by a more peaceful vision of bearded Druids pointing with white wands to the starry sky.

From Salisbury Plain Wordsworth made his way via Bath towards the Welsh border, crossing the Severn Estuary somewhere near Bristol and then ascending the Wye Valley. Today, the lower Wye is still lovely enough to stir the heart, especially when sunlight penetrates the woods that line the valley’s steep sides, glinting on the fast-flowing river below. Brooding cliffs tower against the sky. Ruined castles perch high above the gorge. Celebrated for its picturesque qualities,* this was one of the first places in Britain to attract tourists, and pleasure boats plied up and down the river. Its appeal was marred by importunate beggars who haunted the ruins of Tintern Abbey, and a number of ironworks belching smoke into the air, but neither seems to have bothered Wordsworth. Poetic inspirations came to him one after another: the lovely valley itself, Tintern Abbey, a girl he met at Goodrich Castle who became the heroine of ‘We are Seven’, a tinker he met at Builth who served as a model for ‘Peter Bell’. Above all, the river itself:

… Oh! How oft –

In darkness and amid the many shapes

Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir unprofitable and the fever of the world

Have hung upon the beatings of my heart –

How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,

O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer through the woods,

How often has my spirit turned to thee!

Wordsworth continued north, reaching his friend Robert Jones’s cottage in north Wales towards the end of August. Here he seems to have paused, in anticipation of an onward journey to Halifax to rendezvous with Dorothy, whom he had not seen for almost three years. ‘Oh my dear, dear sister,’ he had written to her earlier that summer, ‘with what transport shall I again meet you, with what rapture shall I again wear out the day in your sight. I assure you so eager is my desire to see you that all obstacles vanish. I see you in a moment running or rather flying to my arms.’²⁹

William and Dorothy had spent most of their lives apart. After the death of their mother in 1778, Dorothy, then only six years old, had been separated from her siblings and sent to live with her mother’s cousin, Elizabeth Threlkeld, more than a hundred miles off in Halifax, while her four brothers – Richard, William, and her two younger brothers, John and Christopher – remained with their father in Cockermouth. She did not return for her father’s funeral in 1784, and was reunited with her brothers only in the summer of 1787, after a gap of nine years. ‘You know not how happy I am in their company,’ she wrote at the time to her bosom friend, Jane Pollard. ‘They are just the kind of boys I could wish them, they are so affectionate and kind to me as makes me love them more and more every day.’ William, then seventeen and nearly two years Dorothy’s senior, was due to go up to Cambridge in the autumn. ‘William and Christopher are very clever boys at least so they appear in the partial eyes of a Sister.’³⁰

The reunion between Dorothy and her brothers in 1787 was all too brief. After a few weeks the young family was once again dispersed: William to Cambridge,* her eldest brother Richard to London where he would train as a lawyer, her two younger brothers back to school in Hawkshead. Dorothy remained unhappily with her grandparents in Penrith until William returned from university the following summer. Later that year Dorothy’s uncle, the Reverend William Cookson, married and took up a living in East Anglia. It was decided that Dorothy, by now sixteen, should accompany her uncle and aunt to the Norfolk village of Forncett St Peter, and live with them there. She would remain at the Forncett rectory for five years, helping her aunt with her burgeoning family and running a little school. It was a lonely life for Dorothy, isolated from the friends she had grown up alongside in Yorkshire. The Cooksons did not share her pursuits and pleasures, though they treated her kindly and affectionately. But Forncett was conveniently close to Cambridge,† and William was able to visit her there in the holidays.

There was a special sympathy between these two. Sensitive, passionate and uninhibited, Dorothy acted as a lightning rod for her more reserved brother, showing him flashes of feeling. ‘I have thought of you perpetually,’ he wrote to her while on his walking tour in the Alps, ‘and never have my eyes burst upon a scene of particular loveliness but I have almost instantly wished that you could for a moment be transported to the place where I stood to enjoy it.’³¹ Wordsworth spent the Christmas vacation before his finals at Forncett; every morning brother and sister would walk in the garden for two hours, pacing backwards and forwards on the gravel arm in arm, even when the keenest north wind was whistling among the trees, and every evening they would walk another two hours or so, engaged in ‘long, long conversations’.

‘I never thought of the cold when he was with me,’ wrote Dorothy to Jane Pollard, to whom she confessed that though she was fond of all her brothers, William was her favourite. In comparison to their youngest brother Christopher (now also at Cambridge), while each was ‘steady and sincere in his attachments’, William was more ardent, with ‘a sort of violence of affection’ towards those whom he loved, like Dorothy, manifest in ‘a thousand almost imperceptible attentions’ to her wishes daily, ‘a sort of restless watchfulness which I know not how to describe, a tenderness that never sleeps, and at the same time such a delicacy of manners as I have observed in few men’. Looking back at the time William was with her at Forncett, Dorothy recalled how ‘he was never tired of comforting his sister, he never left her in anger, he always met her with joy, he preferred her society to every other pleasure, or rather when we were so happy as to be within each other’s reach he had no pleasure when we were compelled to be divided’.³²

‘I am sure you would be pleased with him,’ she told Jane Pollard; ‘he is certainly very agreeable in his manners and he is so amiable, so good, so fond of his Sister! Oh Jane the last time we were together he won my affection to a degree which I cannot describe; his Attentions to me were such as the most insensible of mortals must have been touched with, there was no Pleasure that he would not have given up with joy for half an hour’s conversation with me.’³³ Dorothy wanted her best female friend to think well of her ‘dearest male friend’, but she warned Jane not to expect too much, at least not at the beginning:

In the first place you must be with him more than once before he will be perfectly easy in conversation; in the second place his person is not in his favour, at least I should think not; but I soon ceased to discover this, nay I almost thought that the opinion which I first formed was erroneous. He is however, certainly rather plain than otherwise, has an extremely thoughtful countenance, but when he speaks it is often lighted up with a smile which I think very pleasing …³⁴

The young Wordsworth was not handsome, but not ugly either: slightly taller than the average, and gaunt, with a solemn manner that occasionally collapsed in quiet mirth. His face was dominated by a prominent straight nose, and deep furrows that ran vertically up both cheeks; his eyes were serious, lit by the odd twinkle; his mouth was broad, with full lips; his short fine hair was already beginning to recede.

Dorothy seems to have regarded herself as plain too; she describes herself to Jane Pollard as being without accomplishments, ‘your old friend Dolly Wordsworth’, with ‘nothing to recommend me to your regard but a warm honest and affectionate heart’.³⁵ At twenty she confessed that ‘no man I have seen has appeared to regard me with any degree of partiality; nor has any one gained my affections’.³⁶ Nor was it likely that a dependent young woman with no parents and no inheritance would have found a suitor, unless she was remarkably pretty. For such women, the prospects were bleak: genteel poverty at best* – unless, as often happened, she found a home with a male relative.

Another long period of separation followed Wordsworth’s departure from Forncett early in 1791. Dorothy consoled herself by anticipating ‘the day of my felicity, the day in which I am once more to find a home under the same roof with my brother’. There seemed no doubt in her mind that the day would come. While she still believed that William would take holy orders, she imagined their ‘little parsonage’: closing the shutters in the evening, setting out the tea table, brightening the fire. She pictured the scene when Jane Pollard would come to stay: ‘When our refreshment is ended I produce our work, and William brings his book to our table and contributes at once to our instruction and amusement, and at intervals we lay aside the book and each hazard our observations upon what has been read without the fear of ridicule or censure … Oh Jane! With such romantic dreams as these I amuse my fancy during many an hour which would otherwise pass heavily along.’³⁷

This idyll survived the revelation that Wordsworth had fathered a child in France – though the ‘little parsonage’ became ‘our little cottage’. One immediate effect, however, was that Wordsworth was no longer welcome at Forncett. His uncle Cookson was already disappointed by his clever nephew’s failure to follow the path he had laid, via a Cambridge Fellowship into the Church. From his point of view, Wordsworth had thrown away an excellent opportunity. No doubt he had heard something of Wordsworth’s radical opinions. Early in 1792 Cookson had been appointed Canon of Windsor, a post that brought him into regular contact with the royal family. It must have been embarrassing for him to be connected to a young man who professed republicanism. This latest news decided him.³⁸* A man who had fathered an illegitimate child – a French, Catholic child – could not be considered respectable company for his wife, and must be an unsuitable influence on Dorothy.

So matters stood after Wordsworth’s return from France. He was excluded from Forncett; while Dorothy could not leave Forncett without her uncle’s permission. In the middle of the year 1793, however, a new possibility opened. Since Dorothy’s departure from Halifax, Elizabeth Threlkeld had become Mrs William Rawson; now she and her husband invited Dorothy to come and stay whenever she was free to do so. Dorothy was fond of Mrs Rawson, who in caring for her from the age of six until sixteen had treated her like a daughter, and she very much wanted to pay another visit to the place where she had spent much of her childhood – but she also had a secret reason for accepting the invitation. The Rawsons had seen Wordsworth in London, and had pressed him too to visit them next time he was in the north. Dorothy knew that her uncle Cookson might withhold his permission for her visit to Halifax if he suspected that she might meet her brother there. She and William therefore made a clandestine arrangement to visit the Rawsons at the same time, as if by accident. It was difficult to co-ordinate, because Dorothy could not travel until she could find an escort to chaperone her. Wordsworth had arrived in north Wales, poised to make the short onward journey to Halifax, towards the end of August – but then he had to wait for Dorothy. It would be midwinter before they met. And what he did for the remainder of the year is a mystery.

The next glimpse we have of Wordsworth is at Christmas time, when he is staying with one of his uncles in Whitehaven, on the Cumbrian coast. Again, there is a tantalising clue to suggest what he might have been doing in the interim. In a memoir written in 1867 and published posthumously in his Reminiscences (1881), Thomas Carlyle reported a conversation with Wordsworth held around 1840, a few years after the publication of Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution. Wordsworth apparently told Carlyle that he had witnessed the execution of the journalist Gorsas – who was guillotined on 7 October 1793. Might he really have been in Paris then? Could he have tried to reach the Loire, to see Annette and his infant daughter? Did he plan to marry Annette, as she hoped he might?

It seems unlikely. For one thing, it clashed with his secret plan to meet Dorothy in Halifax. At last an opportunity for them to meet had presented itself: an opportunity that might be lost if he were not there to take it. Then there were numerous practical difficulties Wordsworth would have needed to overcome, including the expense. Also, it was becoming much more dangerous; between 11 and 15 October 1793 all Englishmen remaining in Paris – even Tom Paine – were arrested and imprisoned. After this there would be no further possibility of going to France while the war persisted. Heads were rolling. Gorsas was the first deputy sent to the scaffold; Brissot and many of the remaining Girondin deputies would follow at the end of the month. Marie Antoinette, too, was guillotined on 16 October, a deed that provoked horror throughout Europe. An order went out from the Convention to repress counter-revolution ferociously: ‘Terror will be the order of the day!’ In Lyons, for example, men and women were forced to dig ditches and then stand beside them under cannon fire until they tumbled into their own mass graves. Meanwhile the Atlantic coast was in upheaval. Wordsworth believed – mistakenly, as it turned out – that his friend Beaupuy had been killed while fighting the Vendée rebels.

Even so, it is hard to dismiss altogether the possibility that Wordsworth might have made a visit to France at this time. As a historian of the French Revolution, Carlyle had been impressed by Wordsworth’s strong testimony to the ‘ominous feeling’ which Gorsas’s execution ‘had produced in everybody’, and quoted words that Wordsworth said (or thought) at the time: ‘Where will it end, when you have set an example in this kind?’ In all his reading Carlyle had not before found any trace of the public emotion excited by Gorsas’s death, and he concluded, ‘Wordsworth might be taken as a true supplement to my book, on this small point.’ He seemed convinced that Wordsworth had indeed been there to see Gorsas die. And the implication that some have drawn from Wordsworth’s reported comment is that this must have been the moment when he lost faith in the Revolution.

Any hypothesis that rests on Carlyle’s Reminiscences has to take into account the fact that he was an old man when he wrote the memoir, shattered by the sudden death of his wife, and that he was recalling a conversation that had taken place nearly thirty years before, with another old man who was reminiscing about events that would have happened almost half a century before that. A certain degree of scepticism is legitimate, especially as Carlyle purports to quote from Wordsworth verbatim.

Apart from Carlyle’s report, there is nothing of substance to support the speculation that Wordsworth returned to France in the autumn of 1793. In a volume in Wordsworth’s library there is a marginal note where Gorsas is mentioned: ‘I knew this man. W.W.’ It is easy to imagine how Wordsworth might have known Gorsas while he was staying in Paris the previous winter; much harder to imagine how he could have got to know him immediately before his execution, while he was in hiding and then in prison. But the proof that Wordsworth had known Gorsas at some stage makes Carlyle’s story a little more credible. For those who want to make a case for Wordsworth’s visit to France at this time there is yet another sliver of evidence, in the form of a third-hand account published in 1884 of a meeting in Paris between Wordsworth and ‘an old republican called Bailey’ – but the story is so garbled and contradictory as to be worthless.

Nor is there any reference in The Prelude to another visit to France. It is plausible that Wordsworth might have wanted to hide any trace of a visit to Annette; but that would not explain why he should conceal a visit to Paris. The horror of witnessing the guillotine in action – in the execution of a man he knew – would have left a deep impression on him: an impression which the poet would surely have wanted to describe in the poem on the growth of his own mind, of which such impressions form the essence.

Perhaps Wordsworth did return to Paris in the autumn of 1793. It is not impossible. But the evidence is too flimsy to form conclusions from it – about Wordsworth’s faith in the Revolution, his feelings for Annette Vallon, or anything else.³⁹

By the middle of February 1794 Wordsworth was staying with the Rawsons in Halifax, together with Dorothy. One can be confident that their reunion was a very happy one. And it was extended when William Calvert offered Wordsworth the use of Windy Brow, a farmhouse near Keswick, on a steep bank above the River Greta. The surrounding scenery was magnificent: there were views from a terrace above the house of the whole vale of Keswick, Derwent Water in one direction and Bassenthwaite in the other, with mountains towering all around. Dorothy was so happy to be there with her brother, living in frugal simplicity, that she prolonged her stay from a planned few days to several weeks.

To reach Windy Brow they travelled by coach from Halifax to Kendal, then continued on foot, a two-day ramble much disapproved of by another of their aunts, who sent Dorothy a letter of censure to which Dorothy wrote a spirited reply: ‘So far from considering this as a matter of condemnation, I rather thought it would have given my friends pleasure to hear that I had courage to make use of the strength with which nature has endowed me, when it not only procured me infinitely more pleasure than I should have received from sitting in a post-chaise – but was also the means of saving me at least thirty shillings.’ Her aunt had supposed that Dorothy was living in ‘an unprotected situation’. ‘I consider the character and virtues of my brother as a sufficient protection,’ Dorothy declared defiantly. She defended her decision to prolong her stay at Windy Brow: ‘I am now twenty-two years of age,’ she pointed out, ‘and such have been the circumstances of my life that I may be said to have enjoyed his company only for a very few months. An opportunity now presents itself of obtaining this satisfaction, an opportunity which I could not see pass from me without unspeakable pain. Besides I not only derive much pleasure but much improvement from my brother’s society. I have regained all the knowledge I had of the French language some years ago, and have added considerably to it, and I have now begun reading Italian …’⁴⁰

The walk itself would remain long in the memory of both. Its significance increased as the years passed. This was a return to the country of their childhood – but it also provided a glimpse of their future together, passing through places that would become sacred to them. ‘I walked with my brother at my side, from Kendal to Grasmere, eighteen miles, and afterwards from Grasmere to Keswick, fifteen miles, through the most delightful country that was ever seen.’⁴¹ It was early April when they set out, a day of mixed sun and showers. At their first stop, Staveley, they drank a basin of milk at a public house, and Dorothy washed her feet in a brook, afterwards putting on a pair of silk stockings at her brother’s recommendation. A little further on they reached Windermere, and continued north on the road that runs along the east bank of the lake to Ambleside. They picnicked beside a beck below Wansfell. Towards sunset, as they approached Grasmere, they left the road and followed the footpath along the south side of Rydal Water. The slanting yellow light cast deep shadows before the surrounding mountains.

* Only days before he was condemned in the name of George III, Paine, as a deputy in the Convention, had been sitting in judgement on the former French King.

* One of the now-defunct Inns of Chancery, then attached to Grays Inn. The building still stands on High Holborn.

* In fact Watson had not gone over to the other side. On 27 January 1795, for example, he was the only Bishop to vote against the continuance of the war with France, arguing in the House of Lords that there was no connection between ‘the establishment of a Republic in France, and the subversion of the English constitution’

* Wakefield likened the possibility of a restoration of the monarchy in France to a dog returning to its vomit, a phrase Wordsworth would later use to characterise the coronation of Napoleon as Emperor of France in 1804. See pages 214n and 377.

† Its full title was Peace and Union recommended to the associated Bodies of Republicans and Anti-Republicans.

* A mixture of fortified wine and hot water, sweetened and flavoured.

* Three of Coleridge’s brothers became soldiers, one became a doctor, one a clergyman, and two became schoolmasters

* Coleridge believed that he had succumbed to rheumatic fever, which would affect him periodically from this moment on; but the autopsy performed after his death does not support this diagnosis.

* Alcoholic tincture of opium, a reddish-brown liquid, lighter or darker according to strength. De Quincey kept his in a decanter, where it was sometimes mistaken for port by the unwary.¹⁶

* In 1792 William Wilberforce had introduced to Parliament a Bill to abolish the slave trade. It was passed by the House of Commons; but lacking government support, it was rejected by the Lords.

* An intimate reference.

* Her brother Paul was implicated in a plot to assassinate a prominent Jacobin and forced to go into hiding.

* For example, in the Reverend William Gilpin’s Observations on the River Wye (1782), which Wordsworth carried with him on his return to the Wye Valley with Dorothy in 1798.

* William was sent back with his younger brothers to Hawkshead in midsummer, though Dorothy had hoped that he might be permitted to stay with her until he went up to Cambridge in late October

† Dorothy and the Cooksons called on William there en route to their new home.

* An obvious comparison is Jane Fairfax’s situation at the outset of Emma.

* Wordsworth’s fathering of an illegitimate child seems not to have been a secret within the immediate family, nor was it kept from intimate friends such as Jane Pollard, though it remained hidden from the public until Annette’s letters were discovered in the twentieth century.

3 IDEALISM

‘I am studying such a book!’ gushed Robert Southey, a nineteen-year-old Oxford undergraduate, in a letter to a former schoolmate on 22 November 1793.¹ He was reading William Godwin’s enormously influential An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, published in two volumes earlier in the year, which he had borrowed from the Bristol Library. Southey’s rapturous reaction typified that of thousands of English radicals. For Henry Crabb Robinson, for example, then a teenage articled clerk, Political Justice ‘made me feel more generously’, that the good of the community was his sole duty. Godwin, a former dissenting minister and self-taught philosopher, offered a solution to the problems of these troubling times. Humanity was perfectible, or at least susceptible to permanent improvement. Man was essentially a rational creature; since reason taught benevolence, it followed that men were capable of living in harmony without laws or institutions. In modern terms, Godwin was an anarchist. Society was nothing more than an aggregation of individuals. ‘Efforts for improvement of society must therefore be aimed at the improvement of each individual in it. Until each individual is made more rational, and therefore more moral, social institutions will not become more just.’ Vice resulted from injustice – but this injustice could be overcome only by changing individuals. Godwin rejected all forms of association, including organised political agitation for social reform.

Southey was excited by this new philosophy, which seemed to overturn conventional wisdom. ‘We are born in sin and the children of wrath – says the catechism. It is absolutely false. Sin is artificial – it is the monstrous offspring of government and property. The origin of both was in injustice.’ In a rhetorical flourish, Southey asked any man of feeling to survey the lobby at the theatres or to look at the courtesans on the streets of London. Society was manifestly depraved, he wrote primly. It was innately unjust; by aggrandising the few it oppressed the many. ‘Would man thieve did not want tempt him? Poverty is the nurse of vice where she is dogged by disgrace.’ He did not ask much for himself. ‘Every day’s experience shews me how little Man wants, and every hours reflection now tends to fix my wishes on the grave’ (he was still very young). But ‘whilst Reason keeps the balance I dare live’.²

He rejected the conventional title ‘esquire’. A man who deplored social distinctions could obviously have no truck with monarchy – thus Southey repeatedly declared himself to be a republican, even though to do so publicly might damage his prospects: ‘Perish every hope of life rather than that I should forfeit my integrity.’ He had been swept up in the first wave of enthusiasm for the Revolution; it appeared to him as if the human race was being washed clean. Like Wordsworth, he had fantasised about fighting on the frontier to defend the young Republic. Though subsequently alarmed by the September Massacres and repelled by the execution of the Queen, he remained a determined radical: ‘I can condemn the crimes of the French & yet be a Republican.’³

Even before he discovered Godwin, Southey had imagined an ideal community, an island populated by philosophers. There society could begin anew, without rules or gradations. His imagination was fired by reports of the tropical idyll that had lured the crew of the Bounty into mutiny;* Tahiti had many inducements, he insisted, ‘independant [sic] of its women’ – not only for the sailor, but for the philosopher too. Perhaps Southey was taken with the example of Fletcher Christian, a young rebel against tyrannical authority. Another of his utopian visions was of an ideal city, Southeyopolis. In a letter describing his grandiose scheme for Southeyopolis, Southey felt it necessary to protest that he had not been drinking.⁴

Increasingly, Southey began to talk of emigration to America.⁵ There, in a state of nature, he would find contentment. To the democratic mind there was something attractive in the idea of clearing one’s own land and living in a cottage one had built oneself. As the political outlook in Britain became bleaker, America began to look more attractive. The 1790s saw a new wave of emigrants to America,* many of them dissenters depressed by repeated failure to reform the laws that discriminated against them. Early in 1794 Joseph Priestley decided that he too had had enough of England and sailed across the Atlantic, where he settled in Pennsylvania, on the banks of Susquehanna River.

‘I have been doing nothing and still continue to be doing nothing,’ Wordsworth had admitted to his undergraduate friend William Mathews while he and Dorothy were staying with the Rawsons; ‘what is to become of me I know not.’ He could not face either of the two careers proposed to him, the law or the Church.⁶ It was now more than three years since he had left Cambridge, and he was still drifting from place to place. His only obvious achievement in all this time had been to publish two poems, and though he had another (inspired by his walk across Salisbury Plain) ready for the press, the ‘unmerited contempt’ with which those had been treated by some of the periodicals made him reluctant to publish anything further unless he could hope to ‘derive from it some pecuniary recompense’.⁷ With no income, he was living as modestly as possible, relying on the hospitality of relatives and friends and the occasional subvention from his elder brother, who controlled what meagre resources remained to the young family.

When he confessed to doing nothing, Wordsworth did not mean that he was entirely idle; he was correcting and adding to the poems he had written, a process he continued throughout his career. For Wordsworth, a poem was never finished; as he changed, so he wanted the poem to change, to conform with the man he had become. He found it hard to let go of his work, and only reluctantly would he ever give it to the world. In revising these two poems it may be that he was responding to Dorothy’s criticisms; certainly his later judgement of them closely resembles comments she had made in a letter to Jane Pollard soon after they were published.⁸ New passages he added to ‘An Evening Walk’ anticipate ideas that Coleridge would later articulate to him more fully, and show that the two of them had been following the same tracks before they came into contact.⁹

Mathews urged Wordsworth to come to London. He and another young man were thinking about starting a monthly periodical, and wanted Wordsworth to join them. For his part, Wordsworth felt that he could not venture to London unless he were sure of a regular income – but he was attracted by the notion of a ‘monthly miscellany’, and saw no reason why he should not contribute while remaining in the country. In a succession of letters in the early summer of 1794 he set out his thoughts on the subject. He envisaged ‘a vehicle of sound and exalted morality’, provisionally entitled The Philanthropist. (‘Philanthropist’ was a term much used at the time, meaning progressive or reformer.) Wordsworth felt that the three of them should not be ignorant of each other’s political views. ‘You know perhaps already that I am of that odious class of men called democrats, and of that class I shall for ever continue,’ he announced boldly.¹⁰

It was not a good moment to advertise radical sentiments. Parliament had just passed a declaration that ‘a traitorous and detestable conspiracy had been formed for subverting the existing laws and constitution, and for introducing the system of anarchy and confusion which has so lately prevailed in France’ – after ministers had presented intelligence to secret committees of both Houses. The Habeas Corpus Act (which protected the individual from detention without trial) was accordingly suspended. Twelve prominent radicals, including leaders of the London Corresponding Society and the Society for Constitutional Information, were arrested and imprisoned in the Tower, awaiting trial on charges of treason. Suspect letters were intercepted and opened by the authorities. On the very day that Wordsworth wrote to Mathews, his elder brother Richard warned him to ‘be cautious in writing or expressing your political opinions’. Dorothy (who until very recently had been living with her brother at Windy Brow) replied to Richard: ‘I think I can answer for William’s caution about expressing his political opinions. He is very cautious and seems well aware of the dangers of a contrary conduct.’¹¹

The government’s crackdown was the culmination of months of less co-ordinated repression. In December 1793 a ‘British Convention’ of reformers meeting in Edinburgh had been broken up by the authorities; the secretary, William Skirving, and two delegates from the London Corresponding Society, Joseph Gerrald and Maurice Margarot, were found guilty of sedition and sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation. The dignified conduct of the prisoners during their manifestly unfair trials made a powerful impression on the public, and the widespread revulsion at the savagery of their sentences was strong enough to counterbalance the prevalent horror at events in France. In a separate Scottish case, Robert Watt and David Downie were accused of planning an armed uprising and found guilty of treason: both were sentenced to death, but Downie was pardoned. Watt, who was executed, had been a government informer, and may have been acting as an agent provocateur; the whole conspiracy was probably a bungled attempt to entrap Downie and other radicals. In England, several prosecutions for sedition collapsed in a mêlée of disreputable witnesses and ridiculous charges. For example, the London Corresponding Society was accused of plotting to assassinate the King with a poisoned arrow fired from an airgun, a charge so ludicrous that it immediately earned the name the ‘Pop-Gun Plot’.

Dorothy was mistaken in her assurances to Richard, because a week or so later Wordsworth wrote another letter to Mathews, setting out his political views in greater detail: ‘I disapprove of monarchical and aristocratical governments, however modified. Hereditary distinctions and privileged orders of every species I think must necessarily counteract the progress of human improvement: hence it follows that I am not amongst the admirers of the British constitution.’ He argued that the constitution was being subverted by two causes: the ‘infatuation profligacy and extravagance of men in power’, and the ‘changes of opinion rapidly’ taking place ‘in the minds of speculative men’. He deplored ‘the miserable situation of the French’ – as well he might, because as he wrote these words the Terror was approaching its murderous climax – and believed that ‘a more excellent system of civil policy’ might still be established in Britain without a cataclysmic upheaval. Ministers, not radicals, were driving the country towards the precipice. ‘I recoil from the bare idea of a revolution; yet, if our conduct with reference both to foreign and domestic policy continues such as it has been for the last two years how is that dreadful event to be averted?’ Wordsworth was sure of the answer: ‘gradual and constant reform of those abuses which, if left to themselves, may grow to such a height as to render, even a revolution desirable’. There was, he felt, ‘a further duty incumbent upon every enlightened friend of mankind’, namely to propagate principles of ‘political justice’; these ‘will guide the hand of reform, and if a revolution must afflict us, they alone can mitigate its horrors and establish freedom with tranquillity’.¹²

This is a Godwinian manifesto, punctuated with Godwinian ideas and terminology. Indeed the whole Philanthropist project reeks of Godwin. It is obvious from Wordsworth’s letters in the spring of 1794 that he has read Godwin’s Political Justice. He is moving away from a belief in direct action to achieve political change in Britain towards one of disseminating progressive ideas to bring about reform. ‘I know that the multitude walk in darkness. I would put into each man’s hand a lantern to guide him,’ he wrote to Mathews – echoing Godwin’s metaphor ‘the illumination of our understanding’. Quite when Wordsworth read Godwin is not obvious. It is interesting to speculate how he might have obtained a copy of Political Justice, given that it was relatively expensive* and he was so short of money. Perhaps Calvert had a copy. (Pitt is supposed to have advised the Privy Council that there was no need to suppress Political Justice, as ‘a three guinea book could never do much harm among those who had not three shillings to spare’ – though the price of the first edition was in fact £1.16s.¹³)

Coleridge’s military career lasted little more than four months. He was an unsuitable dragoon, being ‘a very indocile equestrian’ and moreover saddle-sore. In a single week he was thrown from his horse three times, and ‘run away with’ almost every day: ‘I ride a horse young, and as undisciplined as myself.’ During a couple of months’ basic training in the Home Counties Coleridge had evidently not impressed his commanding officers, because when the regiment moved on he was left behind in Henley-upon-Thames to care for a soldier suffering from smallpox. An anxious letter from his brother George caught up with him there. Coleridge’s reply was hysterical with pious remorse and abject self-pity: ‘O that without guilt I might ask of my Maker Annihilation!’¹⁴ He did not attempt to explain his conduct: ‘my mind is illegible to myself’. George tried to organise his release; his eldest surviving brother James, a professional soldier, made a direct appeal to the General in command. The General was too busy to reply, being fully occupied in raising a new regiment, but after three weeks’ delay a response came from the new officer in command. Coleridge had received six and a half guineas’ bounty to enlist; his brothers must pay twenty-five guineas to secure his discharge – on the basis that it would require such an amount to obtain a substitute. No substitute was forthcoming, so another pretext for his release had to be found. An entry in the muster roll of the regiment dated 10 April 1794 reads, ‘discharged S.T. Comberbach/Insane’.

Coleridge returned to Cambridge, to receive another reprimand from the Master. His punishment was to be gated for a month, and to translate ninety pages from the Greek. He accepted his sentence humbly, conscious of his luck that the college had kept his place open. To complete his degree he would have to stay an extra year, to the end of 1795. His brothers had supplied him with cash for his immediate expenses, and raised a handsome sum towards liquidating his college debts; in return, Coleridge promised to reform. In fact, his mind was wandering. At the end of the Trinity term, after only a couple of months in Cambridge, he set out on a walking tour with a good-natured undergraduate called Joseph Hucks. They were destined for Wales – but first they made a stopover in Oxford, to visit Coleridge’s earliest school friend, Robert Allen, who was studying medicine at University College. Allen, who in time would himself join the dragoons as a military surgeon, had sent Coleridge money and various small luxuries during his army ordeal, and twice visited him in his quarters. Allen was renowned for his charm, his intelligence and his good looks; after he had accidentally run into a barrow woman in the street one day, she started to swear at him until she saw his face: ‘Where are you driving to, you great hulking, good-for-nothing – beautiful fellow, God bless you!’

Allen introduced them to another medical student, Robert Southey of Balliol, who coincidentally had made his own ‘pedestrian scheme’ to Cambridge and back the previous May,* when he had attended Frend’s trial in the university court and admired Frend’s oratory in his own defence. Southey and Coleridge took to each other immediately. Though very different characters, the two had much in common: politics, poetry, philosophy, anxiety about money, enthusiasm for walking. They began ‘disputing on metaphysical subjects’, arguing, debating, laughing in the sheer pleasure of having found a kindred spirit. Coleridge was so delighted with his discovery that he postponed his departure from Oxford by more than a fortnight. Hucks, who had accepted Coleridge’s word that they would be stopping in Oxford no longer than three or four days, was compelled to wait while the two new friends talked incessantly.

Southey, still not quite twenty (two years younger than Coleridge), was the eldest son of a Bristol linen-draper who had fallen on hard times and died, leaving the young undergraduate responsible for his mother and three younger brothers. He had acquired polished manners at the home of his wealthy aunt, where he had spent much of his childhood and where he continued to be a favoured guest. Like Wordsworth and so many others, he was depressed by the looming prospect of a career in the Church – ‘starving in creditable celibacy upon 40 pounds a year’ – not least because he found it impossible to stifle doubts, and disliked the thought of perjuring himself. At Westminster he had started a school magazine, The Flagellant; with such a title, it was inevitable that the publication should vigorously condemn the practice of corporal punishment in schools, the only surprise being that this attack was not launched until the fifth issue; Southey was expelled as a result. He arrived in Oxford with ‘a heart full of poetry and feeling, a head full of Rousseau and Werther’.* As if in imitation of Werther, he became infatuated with a young woman before discovering that she was already attached – inspiring him to compose an ‘Ode to Grief’. Southey wrote very fast, all the more impressive as poor eyesight prevented him from reading or writing by candlelight. Together with another young Bristol poet, the Quaker Robert Lovell, he was preparing a volume of poems. Furthermore, he was working on a long epic poem, Joan of Arc, and contemplating another, Wat Tyler. These historical epics rang with contemporary resonance. Southey’s Joan addressed the common people as ‘Citizens’ and owed her position to their support. ‘My Joan is a great democrat,’ he wrote; and in his hands Tyler would become a revolutionary martyr, another Marat.† The story of the peasants’ revolt seemed apposite at a time when sans-culottes† were escorting aristocrats to the scaffold, and indeed Southey was convinced that a revolutionary cataclysm was inevitable in Britain.

Southey freely expressed extreme political opinions, often adopting a posture of noble self-sacrifice. In another poem, ‘The Exiled Patriots’, he celebrated the reformers transported to the colonies:

So shall your great examples fire each soul

So in each freeborn heart for ever dwell

‘Till Man shall rise above the unjust controul

Stand where ye stood – & triumph where ye fell.

For Coleridge, this combination of politics and poetry was irresistible. ‘Thy soaring is even unto heaven,’ he wrote to Southey the day after they parted – ‘Or let me add (for my Appetite for Similies is truly canine at this moment) that as the Italian Nobles their new-fashioned Doors, so thou dost make the adamantine Gate of Democracy turn on it’s [sic]* golden Hinges to most sweet Music.’¹⁵

Tall and bony, Southey was reckoned handsome; in an attempt at dignity he held his chin high; he refused to let his ‘mane’ of dark curly hair be shorn by the college barber, boldly allowing it to hang free and unpowdered when he went into hall to dine; large, dark eyes framed a prominent, beakish nose, giving him ‘a falcon glance’; long, curving eyebrows suggested a sardonic cast of mind. Generous, suave and stoical, stern, principled and dogmatic, he emanated self-satisfied rectitude. To Coleridge, Southey’s combination of cool decisiveness and violent convictions was compelling. He admired his disciplined working habits, and was excited by his daring republican talk. Southey seemed to him to embody the admirably austere qualities of the ancients. ‘He is truly a man of perpendicular Virtue – a down-right upright Republican!’ wrote Coleridge, who could rarely resist a pun, in this case a double entendre; he had discovered that Southey was still a virgin.¹⁶

Southey was immediately impressed by Coleridge’s volcanic intellect, hurling out ideas red hot from the bubbling tumult of his brain: ‘He is of most uncommon merit – of the strongest genius, the clearest judgment, the best heart.’¹⁷ Within a day or two of their meeting he was writing of his new friend as ‘one whom I very much esteem and admire tho two thirds of our conversation be spent in disputing on metaphysical subjects’.¹⁸ Coleridge’s intellectual interests were encyclopaedic, nourished by voracious reading. In particular he was drawn towards philosophy – not the abstract philosophy of word games, but metaphysics, enquiry into the ultimate nature of reality. His arrival energised Southey, who had been languishing in a melancholic stupor.

It was inevitable that these two young idealists should discuss Southey’s utopian dreams. Into the mixture went Rousseau and Godwin, republicanism and philanthropy, notions of pastoral simplicity and honest toil. Within three weeks they had sketched the outline of a scheme for an ideal community of a dozen young couples, isolated from the rest of the world, in which property should be held in common, labour should be contributed to the common good, and all (even women) should participate in government. Two or three hours’ manual work each day should be enough, they calculated, and the rest of the time could be given up to ‘study, liberal discussions, and the education of their children’. Coleridge, who made a habit of coining new words, came up with a name for this system of complete equality: ‘Pantocracy’, later amended to ‘Pantisocracy’.* Some remote part of America seemed the obvious place to try this experiment; Southey proposed Kentucky, but they settled on the Susquehanna as the best possible destination – because, Coleridge later said, he liked the name. It was agreed that they should seek out others to join them. Another Balliol man, George Burnett, was quickly recruited; he and Southey were to travel to Bristol, where they hoped to persuade Robert Lovell to come too. More in hope than expectation, Southey invited his aristocratic friend Grosvenor Charles Bedford: ‘When the storm burst[s] on England you may perhaps follow us to America.’ As Pitt’s government tightened the screw in England, the news from France was of more and more executions, and Southey seems to have envisaged Pantisocracy as a refuge from an impending Armageddon. He decided that his mother and siblings should accompany them. ‘The storm is gathering, and must soon break,’ he wrote to Bedford’s brother Horace. He amused himself with the idea of seeing all his aristocratic friends ‘come flying over for shelter’ to America: ‘You must all come when the fire and brimstone descend.’¹⁹

At last, on 5 July, Coleridge was ready to continue his interrupted walking tour. To make up for lost time, he and Hucks caught the fly* to Gloucester, from where Coleridge wrote to Southey – whom he had left only the day before – saluting him ‘Health and Republicanism!’ Perhaps remembering Southey’s horrifying story of a fifteen-year-old servant girl who had strangled her newborn baby, he parroted Hucks’s reaction to an episode on the road:

It is wrong, Southey! for a little Girl with a half-famished sickly Baby in her arms to put her head in at the window of an Inn – ‘Pray give me a bit of Bread and Meat’! from a Party dining on Lamb, Green Pease, & Sallad – Why?? Because it is impertinent & obtrusive! – I am a Gentleman! – and wherefore should the clamorous Voice of Woe intrude upon mine Ear!?

‘My companion is a Man of cultivated, tho’ not vigorous, understanding,’ he explained; ‘his feelings are all on the side of humanity – yet such are the unfeeling remarks, which the lingering remains of Aristocracy occasionally prompt.’ Coleridge was confident that their new system would put an end to such things. (But even so, there were limits – when, later in the tour, a horny-handed Welsh democrat shook his hand vigorously, Coleridge ‘trembled’ lest some parasite had ‘emigrated’.) In high spirits he informed Southey that he had bought ‘a little Blank Book, and a portable Ink horn – as I journey onward, I ever and anon pluck the wild Flowers of Poesy’. Thus began a lifelong habit of note-keeping.

He continued with an allegory of regicide: ‘When Serpents sting, the only Remedy is – to kill the Serpent …’ (These were dangerous ideas to express in a letter. Though Southey voiced extreme views in conversation, he was more circumspect about what he committed to paper.²⁰) There followed an extract from a poem Coleridge was composing, entitled ‘Perspiration, A Travelling Eclogue’:

The Dust flies smothering, as on clatt’ring Wheels

Loath’d Aristocracy careers along.

Coleridge ended his lively letter, ‘Farewell, sturdy Republican!’ and begged Southey to send ‘Fraternity and civic Remembrances’ to Lovell.²¹

Coleridge and Hucks walked north-west, through Ross and Hereford, and then turned north, following the Welsh border. On the road they met two other undergraduates from Coleridge’s college, and ‘laughed famously’ because ‘these rival pedestrians … were vigorously pursuing their tour – in a post chaise!’ Their excuse for taking it easy thus was that one of them ‘had got clapped’. A week after leaving Hereford, Coleridge arrived at Wrexham, where he wrote to Southey again: ‘I have positively done nothing but dream of the System of no Property every step of the Way since I left you.’²²

At Wrexham Church Coleridge was surprised to see Elizabeth, sister of his former girlfriend Mary Evans; he had forgotten that their grandmother lived there. Indeed, he had virtually forgotten Mary – but the chance encounter provided an opportunity for a good deal of posturing on both sides. Later, at the inn, he saw both Eliza and Mary hovering outside the window: ‘I turned sick, and all but fainted away!’ The young women passed by the window several times. ‘I neither eat, or slept yesterday,’ he wrote after he and Hucks had resumed their journey; ‘but Love is a local Anguish – I am 16 miles distant, and am not half so miserable.’ Coleridge plunged into an ecstasy of Wertherism, all the more delicious because he could expatiate to Southey:

She lives, but lives not for me: as a loving bride, perhaps – ah, sadness! – she has thrown her arms around another man’s neck. Farewell, ye deceitful dreams of a love-lorn mind; ye beloved shores, farewell; farewell, ah, beautiful Mary!*

He convinced himself that he had not pursued Mary because his prospects were so dim. ‘I never durst in a whisper avow my passion, though I knew she loved me.’²³

‘For God’s sake, Southey! enter not into the church.’ Coleridge’s abhorrence of Anglicanism was grounded in belief rather than doubt. He was a devout Christian, then tending towards Unitarianism, and his conscience would not allow him to accept the compromises swallowed by many young men wanting to pursue a career in the established Church.

Coleridge and Hucks continued across north Wales to Anglesey, where they were reunited with the other two Cantabs, now back on their feet. Together they climbed some of the highest peaks in Wales, including Snowdon and Cader Idris, several of the ascents made during the midday summer heat. Coleridge, who thought nothing of walking forty miles in a single day, went so fast that Hucks found it difficult to keep up with him. Afterwards they made their way south again, parting company at Llandovery. Coleridge was headed for Bristol, and followed the Wye Valley downstream towards the sea via Tintern, taking the same route that Wordsworth had followed a year earlier, but in the opposite direction.

Arriving in Bristol, Coleridge immediately sought out Southey. He sent a message to Lovell – signing himself ‘Your fellow Citizen’ – asking where his friend was to be found. Southey happened to be dining that evening with Lovell and his new wife, the actress Mary Fricker, together with her pretty eldest sister, Sara.* These three had already heard much from Southey of Coleridge’s genius, so they were intrigued when he appeared at the dinner table, brown as a berry, his clothes in tatters and his hair wild, weary of walking but certainly not of talking. He was in high good humour, exhilarated at seeing Southey again, animated and funny. Sara laughed at his jokes and made some sharp remarks of her own. As he held forth, he noticed her sparkling dark eyes, her brown curling hair and her full, inviting figure.

There were five Fricker girls (and one boy), as Coleridge rapidly discovered, daughters of a widow who kept a dress shop in Bristol. Lovell had just married one daughter, and Southey was courting another. George Burnett had his eye on a third. Obviously it was urgent for the Pantisocrats to find themselves mates. It seemed possible that the whole Fricker family, mother and all, might be joining them on the banks of the Susquehanna. How appropriate if Coleridge were to become united with one of the two remaining daughters! For him, it was a similar set-up to the one he had enjoyed at Villiers Street. He had lost Mary Evans, and in doing so lost a family. Now, perhaps, he had found another.

Over the next few days, as they discussed and refined the Pantisocratic project, Southey introduced Coleridge to his Bristol friends and showed him around. Until recently Bristol had been England’s second city after London, though it was rapidly being overhauled by the new industrial cities of the north. It remained an important port, with a busy quayside and clusters of masts poking up above the roofline, lurching at drunken angles when the tide fell and the ships settled on the mud. Also prominent on the skyline were many church steeples, and the chimneys of glassworks belching out black smoke. The city had spread right across the floodplain of the Avon, and extended up the adjoining hills to form the smart suburbs of Clifton and Kingsdown, where gracious terraces and crescents provided commanding views. The river curved behind the hills through a gorge, with hanging woods: ‘a scene truly magnificent’, wrote Southey, ‘and wanting nothing but clearer water’.²⁴ Bristol was a centre of glass and china manufacture, with significant numbers of literate and politically sophisticated artisans. The radical sympathies of a prosperous nonconformist community confronted the conservatism of professional men and wealthy merchants, including those who had grown rich trading in slaves.²⁵ The issue of the war cut across this divide. Because Bristol was so dependent on commerce, it had been badly affected by mercantile failures consequent upon the war; there had been riots in the city for the past two years.

One of those whom Coleridge met in Bristol was Joseph Cottle, a young Baptist bookseller-publisher and would-be poet who kept a shop on the corner of Corn Street and High Street. Cottle had recently been thrown from a gig, an accident which left him lame for the rest of his life. Lovell had introduced Southey to Cottle, and now introduced Coleridge. Cottle immediately recognised Coleridge’s ‘intellectual character’ – exhibiting, as he did, ‘an eye, a brow, and a forehead, indicative of commanding genius’ – and subsequent meetings ‘increased the impression of respect’. The friendly manners of the Pantisocrats, Cottle wrote many years later in his Reminiscences, ‘infused into my heart a brotherly feeling, that more than identified their interests with my own’.²⁶ He agreed to publish the joint volume of poetry by Southey and Lovell, and offered a lavish fee of fifty guineas for Southey’s Joan of Arc. As Southey wrote many years afterwards, ‘it can rarely happen that a young author should meet with a publisher as inexperienced and ardent as himself’.

In mid-August Coleridge and Southey set out from Bristol on a walking tour into Somerset, where they were to seek more recruits to Pantisocracy. Both seem to have been in a state of high excitement, relishing each other’s company. They walked first to Bath, to spend the night with Southey’s mother, herself already drafted into the Pantisocratic regiment, as was Southey’s brother Tom. At her house in Westgate Buildings they found Sara Fricker, whom Mrs Southey had invited to stay so that they could ‘talk over the American affair’. Perhaps Southey connived in bringing Sara together with Coleridge again. By the time the two men left the next morning, accompanied by Southey’s dog Rover, some kind of understanding seems to have been reached between Coleridge and the eldest Miss Fricker – though they had known each other little more than a week. (She would still be there when they returned a week later, drunk on the heady wine of Pantisocracy; and after another conversation, Coleridge seems to have committed himself further.)

Their route took them across the Mendip Hills, via Chilcompton and Wells. They spent their first night at Cheddar, sleeping in a garret, where they were locked in by a suspicious landlady who took these wild-looking young men for possible ‘footpads’. There was only one bed. ‘Coleridge is a vile bedfellow and I slept but ill,’ complained Southey.²⁷ The next day they made for Huntspill, down on the Somerset Levels, to call on George Burnett, who was fired with fresh enthusiasm for Pantisocracy, much to the dismay of his father, a prosperous farmer who intended his son for the Church. Then the two missionaries headed for Shurton on the west Somerset coastline, to the home of Henry Poole, one of Coleridge’s fellow undergraduates from Jesus. He proved more resistant to the new religion, but escorted the two visitors to see his cousin Thomas Poole, a known radical who lived not far away in the small town (really no more than a large village) of Nether Stowey, at the base of the Quantock Hills (this was familiar country for Southey, whose grandfather had farmed at nearby Holford). Poole was the son of a successful tanner, a stout, plain, sensible man of twenty-nine with a rubicund complexion and a noticeable West Country burr. Yet his prosaic exterior concealed a mind generous, liberal and well-read. An enlightened employer with a practical concern for the poor and downtrodden,* Poole was liked and admired even by those who detested his principles. His enthusiasm for revolutionary politics had earned him the label ‘the most dangerous person in the county of Somerset’ (perhaps not such a distinction), and some of his letters had been intercepted and opened on government instructions.

Coleridge talked freely, not just about Pantisocracy, but about his own ‘aberrations from prudence’, which he promised were now at an end. Poole was very impressed by this visitor, a ‘shining scholar’ whom he considered ‘the Principal in the undertaking’. He was not so impressed by Southey, who seemed ‘a mere boy’ by comparison, lacking Coleridge’s ‘splendid abilities’, though he was ‘even more violent in his principles’. Poole, who had himself considered emigrating to America, listened sympathetically as they outlined their scheme; but he felt that however perfectible human nature might be, it was ‘not yet perfect enough’ for Pantisocracy.²⁸

In France, Robespierre and his associates tightened their grip on power, eliminating their rivals without qualm. The purge of the Girondins was followed by further purges in the spring of 1794. Death followed death, and more deaths. Everyone was afraid, but no one dared show fear. Now the severed heads being displayed to the Paris crowds were those of prominent revolutionaries, men who themselves had until recently been demanding executions. ‘Oh Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!’ cried the Girondin Madame Roland from the scaffold – though it was she who had declared that there must be blood to cement the Revolution. A macabre poster displayed a group of heads hanging horridly from a board, the leering faces still recognisable, with the legend, ‘It is dreadful but it is necessary.’ Robespierre himself possessed the certainty of a zealot. He was incorruptible; he spoke for the Republic; anyone who criticised him was an enemy of the people. The ideologue of the Revolution, he articulated the principles of the slaughter. He envisaged a Republic of virtue; he would make man better. The aims of the Revolution were the peaceful enjoyment of liberty and equality, and the reign of eternal justice. He exhorted his listeners to seal their work with blood, so that they might see the dawn of universal happiness. ‘Terror is the only justice that is prompt, severe, and inflexible; it is thus an emanation of virtue …’²⁹

For those ideologically committed to the young Republic, like Wordsworth, this was a time of torment. A believer could not relinquish his faith without a struggle. As the Revolution progressed, its fellow travellers had accepted one sacrifice after another in the cause of the greater good; accepted them, and then justified them to the world. They had swallowed so much blood already; now they were choking on it. Wordsworth confessed to nightmares that continued for years after the Terror had abated:

I scarcely had one night of quiet sleep,

Such ghastly visions had I of despair,

And tyranny, and implements of death,

And long orations which in dreams I pleaded

Before unjust Tribunals, with a voice

Labouring, a brain confounded, and a sense

Of treachery and desertion in the place

The holiest that I knew of – my own soul.³⁰

Yet even now, Wordsworth did not lose faith. On the contrary, in the ‘rage and dog-day heat’ of the Revolution, he found ‘something to glory in, as just and fit’. Like so many intellectuals since,

I felt a kind of sympathy with power.³¹

In the confused period after the September Massacres, Wordsworth shared the general longing for a strong man to impose order, not doubting …’

But that the virtue of one paramount mind

Would have abashed those impious crests, have quelled

Outrage and bloody power, and in despite

Of what people were through ignorance

And immaturity, and, in the teeth

Of desperate opposition from without,

Have cleared a passage for just government

And left a solid birthright to the state,

Redeemed according to example given

By ancient lawgivers … ³²

But which ancient lawgivers? There was no question that the one paramount mind’ was Robespierre – but was he a Brutus, or a Caesar? A Cato, or a Tarquin? Was the exemplar of civic virtue becoming a tyrant? Wordsworth’s inner struggle was one of interpretation. Should Robespierre be seen as the apotheosis of the Revolution, to be defended, indeed admired, even though he was drenched in blood? Or was he rather, as Wordsworth began to perceive, an aberration, a perversion of the Revolutionary ideal? Arriving at the latter conclusion came as a huge relief to Wordsworth. All the horrors that had seemed concomitant with the Revolution could be ascribed to this deviation from its true path.

Wordsworth had refused to accept the taunts of scoffers, those who sneered that the chaos of the Terror was the inevitable result of democratic government. On the contrary, this was a legacy of the past:

… it was a reservoir of guilt

And ignorance, filled up from age to age,

That could no longer hold its loathsome charge,

But burst and spread in deluge through the land.³³

He detested ‘the execrable measures pursued in France’, but equally insisted on holding up ‘to the approbation of the world such of their regulations and decrees as are dictated by the spirit of Philosophy’.³⁴ For him, Terror was not intrinsic to the Revolution; it was a reaction to the threat from without, aided by the enemy within. As he saw it, the entry of Britain into the coalition against Revolutionary France had prompted the bloodshed:

In France, the men who for their desperate ends

Had pluck’d up mercy by the roots were glad

Of this new enemy. Tyrants, strong before

In devilish pleas, were ten times stronger now,

And thus beset with foes on every side,

The goaded land waxed mad … ³⁵

And when, in an astonishing turnaround, the new conscript army repelled the enemies of France, and once more surged across the borders, Wordsworth rejoiced – even when English troops fled the battlefield in shame and confusion:*

… the invaders fared as they deserved:

The Herculean Commonwealth had put forth her arms,

And throttled with an infant Godhead’s might

The snakes about her cradle; that was well,

And as it should be … ³⁶

The Terror reached a climax in the early summer. In response to a manufactured ‘conspiracy’ a new law was passed, granting the Revolutionary Tribunal absolute powers. Only by the most extreme measures would the enemy within be exterminated. The accused were permitted no defence; there were to be no witnesses; there would be only one sentence: death. Every day there were dozens of executions. A contemporary cartoon showed Robespierre, having ordered the execution of everyone else, guillotining the executioner. In fact, for much of the six-week period known as the Great Terror, Robespierre kept ominously aloof from both the Committee of Public Safety and the Convention. Then, after a month, he returned to the Convention on 26 July, denouncing a new conspiracy and demanding yet another purge. This time his opponents were prepared. When Robespierre tried to address the Convention again the next day, he was shouted down. He was arrested, and after a bungled attempt at suicide he was hastily guillotined, together with Saint-Just and other close associates. It was the 10th of Thermidor, in Year II of the Republic (28 July 1794).

Wordsworth heard of Robespierre’s downfall while he was staying with cousins at Rampside, near Barrow-in-Furness, the southernmost tip of the Lake District. Some months earlier he and Dorothy had left Windy Brow and gone in different directions, promising each other that they would soon be reunited in a more permanent home; since then he had remained in the Lakes, rotating around his relatives in the area. One morning he strolled to Cartmel, a village just across the estuary of the two little rivers that flow out of Windermere and Coniston. There, wandering through the churchyard, he had happened across the grave of his former schoolteacher, William Taylor. Now he was walking back to Rampside, across the miles of sand revealed by the receding tide. It was sunny, with magnificent prospects of the mountains to the north. At low tide it is easy to wade the shallow stream; the sands stretch far out into Morecambe Bay, and on this fine summer day they were spotted with coaches, carts, riders and walkers. While he paused on a rocky outcrop drinking in the view, a passer-by told him that Robespierre was dead. An exultant Wordsworth let forth a shout of triumph: ‘Come now, ye golden times.’

… few happier moments have been mine

Through my whole life than that when first I heard

That this foul tribe of Moloch was o’erthrown

And their chief regent levelled with the dust.³⁷

His wavering faith was renewed.

… In the People was my trust,

And in the virtues which mine eyes had seen,

And to the ultimate repose of things

I looked with unabated confidence.

I knew that wound external could not take

Life from the young Republic, that new foes

Would only follow in the path of shame

Their brethren, and her triumphs be in the end

Great, universal, irresistible.³⁸

Coleridge and Southey heard of Robespierre’s death while they were still with Poole in west Somerset. ‘I had rather have heard of the death of my own father,’ Southey declared solemnly – a declaration that loses some of its force when one reflects that his father had died several years before. But Poole’s cousins in Over Stowey, whom he had taken the visitors to meet, were suitably indignant at such outrageous talk, and even more so when they heard one of the two young men say that Robespierre had been ‘a ministering angel of mercy, sent to slay thousands that he might save millions’.³⁹

There was no doubt in the minds of the Pantisocrats that Robespierre’s fall was a ‘tragedy’. For Southey, Robespierre was ‘this great man’, who had been ‘sacrificed to the despair of fools and cowards’. For Coleridge he was a man ‘whose great bad actions cast a disastrous lustre over his name’. They agreed that he had been ‘the benefactor of mankind, and that we should lament his death as the greatest misfortune Europe could have sustained’.⁴⁰ To these young idealists, Robespierre’s fanatical zealotry was preferable to Pitt’s opportunistic pragmatism. They admired Robespierre’s ardour, his oratory, his ferocity. He had aimed at human perfection, even if he had stumbled along the route. Like other British radicals, they explained away the Terror as a response to pressures from without. Robespierre and his associates had been provoked into violence. Indeed, the Terror was Pitt’s responsibility.

On the walk back to Bristol the two young men decided to commemorate Robespierre’s fall by writing a verse drama, to be published as quickly as possible. Coleridge was to write the first act, Southey the second, and Lovell the third (in the event Lovell dropped out). The money raised from this instant publication would be used to fund the Pantisocracy scheme. They began immediately, working around the clock. Southey’s talent for speedy composition proved useful, as did taking in large chunks from newspaper reports of speeches in the Convention.

… Never, never,

Shall this regenerated country wear

The despot yoke. Though myriads round assail

And with worse fury urge this new crusade

Than savages have known; though all the leagued despots

Depopulate all Europe, so to pour

The accumulated mass upon our coasts,

Sublime amid the storm shall France arise

And like the rock amid surrounding waves

Repel the rushing ocean. – She shall wield

The thunder-bolt of vengeance – She shall blast

The despot’s pride, and liberate the world.

These sentiments might just as easily have been expressed by Wordsworth. But having lived in France and having witnessed the Revolution at close quarters, Wordsworth was much more committed than either Coleridge or Southey; he struggled to interpret each bewildering development, like a believer trying to cling on to his failing faith. Coleridge, on the other hand, was excited by the Revolution, but not caught up in it, as is shown by his eccentric decision to enlist. Had he remained in the army he might well have found himself fighting against Beaupuy and those young volunteers so admired by Wordsworth. Indeed, had Wordsworth followed his impulse to join the Revolutionary cause, the two might have found themselves fighting on opposite sides.

Within a week The Fall of Robespierre was all but finished. Cottle prudently declined to publish it. Coleridge therefore took the manuscript with him to London, where he hoped to find a publisher while he sought new recruits to Pantisocracy. Before he left, the Pantisocrats finalised their scheme. The party would be made up of twelve men and their families. A total of £2,000 would be needed to fund the expedition, including the cost of their passage and the purchase of the land. Within twelve months (at most) they would be settled on the banks of the Susquehanna in Pennsylvania. During the course of the winter, Coleridge decided, ‘those of us whose bodies, from habits of sedentary study or academic indolence, have not acquired their full tone and strength, intend to learn the theory and practice of agriculture and carpentry, according as situation and circumstances make one or the other convenient’.⁴¹

For Southey, parting from Coleridge was like ‘losing a limb’. But he looked forward to ‘sharing in the toil and in the glory of regenerating mankind … Futurity opens a smiling prospect upon my view and I doubt not of enjoying the purest happiness Man can ever experience.’⁴²

Once again Wordsworth declined Mathews’s invitation to come to London. By chance an opportunity had presented itself to escape from the drudgery he dreaded. Raisley Calvert, younger brother of William, the school friend whom Wordsworth had accompanied to the Isle of Wight, offered Wordsworth a share of his income. This was a gentlemanly formula for helping Wordsworth with his essential expenses at a time when he was obviously struggling, while allowing him a degree of independence. Later, when it became clear that Raisley Calvert was dying of tuberculosis, he converted this into a legacy of £600, eventually increased to £900. Such a bequest was not unknown, but it was unusual enough for Richard Wordsworth to remark on Calvert’s ‘generous intentions towards you’. It was not as if Calvert was an old friend; he and Wordsworth had met only once before, when Calvert was passing through London early the previous year. Clearly this was a potential source of embarrassment, enough so for Wordsworth himself to want to inform William Calvert, who would otherwise have inherited the money along with the remainder of his brother’s estate. ‘It is at my request that this information is communicated to you, and I have no doubt but that you will do both him and myself the justice to hear this mark of his approbation of me without your good opinion of either of us being at all diminished by it.’⁴³ Why Raisley Calvert felt Wordsworth should benefit in this way is not certain. In later years Wordsworth claimed that Calvert had made the bequest entirely from a confidence on his part that I had powers and attainments which might be of use to mankind’.⁴⁴ If this is accurate, it is striking evidence of Wordsworth’s sense of mission, and the way in which this could communicate itself to others – especially as his achievements to date were not especially impressive.

As Calvert’s health deteriorated Wordsworth felt obliged to remain close to him, no doubt from a mixture of motives. Provided that his expenses were paid, he was willing to accompany Calvert to Portugal, and stay with him there until his health was re-established. On 9 October they set out from Keswick together, but had only reached Penrith when Calvert’s condition forced them to return. ‘He is so much reduced as to make it probable he cannot be on earth long,’ Wordsworth reported to his brother Richard a week later.

Wordsworth feared that Calvert’s legacy might be claimed by his aunt, as payment for the sums advanced for his education by her late husband. He therefore asked his brother Richard to indemnify him against such a claim. In his anxiety to secure Calvert’s legacy, Wordsworth’s request was made in a peremptory tone; Richard’s reply showed his irritation at being addressed in such a manner by his younger brother:

There is one Circumstance which I will mention to you at this time. I might have retired into the Country and I had almost said enjoyed the sweets of retirement and domestick life if I had only considered my own Interest. However as I have entered the busy scenes of a town life I shall I hope pursue them with comfort and credit. I am happy to inform you that my Business encreases daily and altho’ our affairs have been peculiarly distressing I hope that from the Industry of ourselves at one time we will enjoy more ease and independence than we have yet experienced.⁴⁵

If Wordsworth was stung by this implied criticism, he did not show it. Perhaps he accepted the rebuke as just. He had nothing to show for his expensive education. And since leaving Cambridge almost four years earlier, his only contribution to the family had been an illegitimate child by a French mistress.

* In 1792 Captain Bligh published his account of the mutiny, and in September of that same year ten prisoners repatriated from Tahiti to England were tried by a naval court.

* In 1795 the Gentleman’s Magazine reported that a group of Girondin émigrés had settled at Frenchtown near the Susquehanna.

* Seventy-two times the price of Rights of Man (6d). By comparison, the average weekly income was around ten shillings.

* The previous Easter he had made a three-week walking tour of the Midlands.

* Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) influenced several generations of young men across Europe. ‘Wertherism’ became a recognisable syndrome. The novel’s hero is a melancholic, an artist at odds with society and hopelessly in love with a girl engaged to another man. He eventually commits suicide as a result,

† An added attraction was the potential embarrassment to his conservative Aunt Tyler.

‡ Literally, ‘without knee-breeches’, since coarse long trousers were the habitual dress of the Parisian working class: used as shorthand for those political activists – mainly small shopkeepers, tradesmen and artisans – who constituted the foot-soldiers of the Revolution.

* Coleridge’s spelling was haphazard, as was his grammar and use of capitals; in particular, he always wrote ‘it’s’ when he meant ‘its’.

* From the Greek ‘pant – ’, a root meaning ‘all’; ‘isos’, meaning ‘equal’; and ‘krat’, meaning ‘power’.

* A one-horse hackney carriage, i.e. a taxi.

* These lines were encoded in Latin verse.

* Actually Sarah, but Coleridge almost always spelled it Sara, so I have used this throughout.

* Poole was one of those who refused to allow the use of sugar in his household, insisting that cakes be made with honey instead. The anti-slavery campaigner Thomas Clarkson estimated that 300,000 people in England took part in a nationwide boycott of sugar, protesting at Parliament’s failure to pass a Bill abolishing the slave trade.

* The Prelude, X, 258–63. Most Wordsworth scholars follow De Selincourt in taking this passage to refer to the French victory at Hondeschoote on 6 September 1793; but the description seems to fit better the rout of the British army at Tourcoing on 18 May 1794, when their commander the Duke of York (the King’s brother) was hunted across the country and escaped only thanks to the speed of his horse.

4 SEDITION

Arriving in London at the beginning of September, Coleridge was too ashamed of his scruffy clothes to go to the coffee house where he had stayed in the past, so instead he lodged at the Angel Inn, down a lane off disreputable Newgate Street. Southey’s aristocratic friend Grosvenor Charles Bedford received him politely – even though his appearance was ‘so very anti-genteel’ – and was civil enough not to stare at the address Coleridge gave him. As expected, he was not enthusiastic about Pantisocracy. A couple of days later Coleridge was introduced over breakfast to George Dyer, an eccentric middle-aged Unitarian, author of Complaints of the Poor People of England, who had been a pupil at Christ’s Hospital and an undergraduate at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. By contrast with Bedford, Dyer was ‘enraptured’ with Pantisocracy, and pronounced it impregnable’. Coleridge told Southey complacently that Dyer was ‘intimate with’ Joseph Priestley (already settled on the Susquehanna), ‘and doubts not, that the Doctor will join us’. On being shown part of the verse drama ‘he liked it hugely’ and opined that it was a ‘Nail, that would drive’. Dyer offered to speak to Robinson, his ‘Bookseller’ (publisher), about it, and when Robinson proved to be away in the country, took it to two others, neither of whom seemed keen.¹ After this depressing reaction Coleridge decided that he and Southey should publish the drama themselves, printing five hundred copies; ‘it will repay us amply’. It should be published under his name alone, he told Southey, because ‘it would appear ridiculous to put two names to such a Work’, and because his name would sell at least a hundred copies within Cambridge.² The Fall of Robespierre duly appeared as the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge at Jesus College at the end of September.

For the next fortnight or so, Coleridge spent every evening at another ale house in Newgate Street, the Salutation and Cat, where he preached Pantisocracy to two former Christ’s Hospital schoolboys, both nineteen, Samuel Le Grice (younger brother of Coleridge’s contemporary Valentine) and Samuel Favell. The three Sams made a comfortable party, talking and drinking porter and punch around a good fire. They were joined by another former Christ’s Hospital pupil, who remembered Coleridge kindly, a young man who had spent the last five years in America. He advised that they could buy land a great deal cheaper over there, Coleridge informed Southey, and that ‘twelve men may easily clear three hundred Acres in 4 or 5 months’; that the Susquehanna valley was to be recommended for its ‘excessive Beauty, and it’s security from hostile Indians’; that ‘literary Characters make money there’; that ‘he never saw a Byson in his Life – but has heard of them’; that ‘the Musquitos are not so bad as our Gnats – and after you have been there a little while, they don’t trouble you much’.³ Altogether this was very encouraging.

Coleridge returned to Cambridge later than he had intended, to find that the undergraduates he had encountered on the road during his tour of Wales had ‘spread my Opinions in mangled forms’. He soon set them right. There was some interest in Pantisocracy within the university, and some amusement too; Coleridge was a colourful character. But his eloquence trounced all opposition; within a month of his return, he boasted, Pantisocracy was the ‘universal Topic’ there. Meanwhile – notwithstanding his understanding with Sara Fricker – he flirted with Ann, sister of the celebrated actress Elizabeth Brunton and daughter of John Brunton, actor-manager of a company based in Norwich. He dedicated to her a poem on the French Revolution which he inscribed in a presentation copy of The Fall of Robespierre. He planned to visit the Bruntons in Norwich in the New Year. ‘The young lady is said to be the most literary of the beautiful, and the most beautiful of the literatae,’ he wrote provocatively to Southey – while almost in the same breath defending himself against the charge that he had written too seldom to Sara.

Southey had been having a difficult time. Once Coleridge had left, it seemed that ‘all the prejudices of the human heart are in arms against me’. Neither his fiancée nor his mother was keen to leave England. His rich aunt turned him out of the house one wet night when she discovered his plan to emigrate from her servant Shadrach Weeks, whom Coleridge had recruited to Pantisocracy. She was equally disapproving of his plan to marry Edith Fricker, a milliner. Though Southey (parroting Godwin) preached disregarding ‘individual feelings’ – towards one’s mother or future wife, for example – he found this principle hard to practise. To Coleridge, Southey appeared to be backsliding, now saying that some of the emigrants might continue as servants, thereby freeing others of domestic chores. ‘Let them dine with us and be treated with as much equality as they would wish – but perform that part of Labor for which their Education has fitted them,’ he advocated. ‘Southey should not have written this Sentence,’ insisted Coleridge, who suspected that his friend’s resolve was being undermined by the women in the party.⁴

But while Coleridge strove to keep Southey to the founding principles of Pantisocracy, Southey chided him for neglecting Sara Fricker. Each sought the moral high ground. Southey was painfully aware that he had forfeited his aunt’s favour, at least partly for Edith’s sake. In self-righteous mood, he was intolerant of Coleridge’s vacillating commitment to Sara. It is possible that Southey was under pressure from Edith to argue her sister’s case with his friend. But it seems likely too that Southey was genuinely concerned about Sara. There is some evidence that he had been interested in her himself, before turning his attentions towards her more placid younger sister. In later life he continued to be solicitous for her welfare. Moreover, in encouraging Coleridge’s relationship with Sara, he was binding Coleridge closer to himself – ‘I shall then call Coleridge my brother in the real sense of the word.’⁵ Conversely, Coleridge encouraged Southey’s relationship with Edith. ‘I am longing to be with you,’ he wrote to Southey on his first morning in Cambridge: ‘Make Edith my Sister – Surely, Southey! We shall be frendotatoi meta frendous. Most friendly where all are friends. She must therefore be more emphatically my Sister.’ In this overwrought dialogue, each man was goading the other to commit – to the woman certainly, but also to Pantisocracy, perhaps also to himself. For Coleridge, all three were bound up with each other: ‘America! Southey! Miss Fricker!’ He convinced himself that he was in love with her: ‘Yes – Southey – you are right – Even Love is the creature of strong Motive – I certainly love her.’⁶ Yet a week later he described himself as ‘labouring under a waking Night-Mair of Spirits’⁷ – not the expected state of mind for a young man in love. In the first letter he wrote to Sara from Cambridge, his own eloquence betrayed him into expressing emotions he did not fully feel. He later described this as ‘the most criminal action of my Life … I had worked myself to such a pitch, that I scarcely knew I was writing like an hypocrite.’ When it was too late, he recognised that he had ‘mistaken the ebullience of schematism for affection, which a moment’s reflection might have told me, is not a plant of so mushroom a growth’.⁸

‘God forbid!’ replied Southey, ‘that the Ebullience of Schematism should be over. It is the Promethean Fire that animates my soul – and when that is gone, all will be darkness! I have DEVOTED myself! –’⁹

The night he arrived back in Cambridge, Coleridge wrote a strange, emotional letter to Edith, recalling his own dead sister Nancy.

I had a Sister – an only Sister. Most tenderly did I love her! Yea, I have woke at midnight, and wept – because she was not …

There is no attachment under heaven so pure, so endearing …

My Sister, like you, was beautiful and accomplished … I know, and feel, that I am your Brother – I would, that you would say to me – ‘I will be your sister – your favourite Sister in the Family of Soul.’¹⁰

A month later, Coleridge was thrown into deeper confusion by the arrival of an unsigned letter in a familiar hand: ‘Is this handwriting altogether erased from your Memory? To whom am I addressing myself? For whom am I now violating the Rules of female Delicacy? Is it for the same Coleridge, whom I once regarded as a Sister her best-beloved Brother?’ The writer urged him to abandon his ‘absurd and extravagant’ plan to leave England. ‘I cannot easily forget those whom I once loved,’ she wrote teasingly, and finished: ‘Farewell – Coleridge – ! I shall always feel that I have been your Sister.’ The writer, of course, was Mary Evans. She may have written at the request of George Coleridge, who was deeply distressed at the possibility that his youngest brother might emigrate. George had also written to him direct – a letter of ‘remonstrance, and Anguish, & suggestions, that I am deranged!!’

Coleridge copied out Mary’s letter for Southey:

I loved her, Southey! almost to madness … I endeavoured to be perpetually with Miss Brunton – I even hoped, that her Exquisite Beauty and uncommon Accomplishments might have cured one passion by another. The latter I could easily have dissipated in her absence – and so have restored my affections to her, whom I do not love – but whom by every tie of Reason and Honour I ought to love. I am resolved – but wretched!

He was now in even more of a muddle. ‘My thoughts are floating about in a most Chaotic State,’ he confessed. ‘What would I not give for a Day’s conversation with you? So much, that I seriously think of Mail coaching it to Bath – altho’ but for a Day.’¹¹

His excitable state of mind is evident in a letter he wrote around this time to Francis Wrangham, formerly of Cambridge, now a Cobham curate, in which he sneered at the stock formula of sending ‘compliments’.*

Compliments! Cold aristocratic Inanities – ! I abjure their nothingness. If there be any whom I deem worthy of remembrance – I am their Brother. I call even my Cat Sister in the Fraternity of universal Nature. Owls I respect & Jack Asses I love: for Aldermen & Hogs, Bishops & Royston Crows I have not particular partiality –; they are my Cousins however, at least by Courtesy. But Kings, Wolves, Tygers, Generals, Ministers, and Hyaenas, I renounce them all – or if they must be my kinsmen, it shall be in the 50th Remove –

He ended this letter with the exhortation: ‘May the Almighty Panti-socratizer of Souls pantisocratize the Earth.’¹³ A little later, he addressed a poem ‘To a Young Ass’, which opened with the line ‘Poor Little Foal of an oppressed Race’:

Innocent Foal! Thou poor despis’d Forlorn! –

I hail thee Brother, spite of Fool’s Scorn!

And fain I’d take thee with me in the Dell

Of high-soul’d Pantisocracy to dwell;

Coleridge was much mocked for this poem after it was published.

He could not stop thinking about Mary Evans. ‘She WAS VERY lovely, Southey!’ He wrote a poem about her, ‘On a Discovery Made Too Late’. Finally, he screwed up the courage to write to her: ‘Too long has my Heart been the torture house of Suspense.’ He had heard a rumour that she was engaged to be married to another man. Was it true? In asking this, he had no other design or expectation, he said, ‘than that of arming my fortitude by total hopelessness’. He saw that she regarded him ‘merely with the kindness of a Sister’. For four years, he wrote, ‘I have endeavoured to smother a very ardent attachment … Happy were I, had it been with no more than a Brother’s ardor!’¹⁴

He received another letter from George, now suggesting that he should leave Cambridge and study law in the Temple – and in reply, assured his brother that the views he had put into the mouths of his characters in The Fall of Robespierre were not his own. ‘Solemnly, my Brother! I tell you – I am not a Democrat.’¹⁵ (Thomas Poole had described Coleridge as ‘in politicks a Democrat, to the utmost extent of the word’.¹⁶)

Early in November Coleridge travelled up to London with his friend Potter, an undergraduate at Emmanuel, a fellow poet, and liberal in politics despite having £6,000 a year and his own phaeton. The cases against the twelve prominent radicals charged with treason had come to trial,* and Coleridge wanted to be on the spot. (He may have attended the trials themselves in the public gallery.) Robert Lovell was in town too; he visited one of the defendants, Godwin’s close friend Thomas Holcroft, in Newgate prison, and attempted to convert him to Pantisocracy. He believed (mistakenly) that he had succeeded, and reported back to Southey that ‘Gerrald,† Holcroft and Godwin – the three first men in England, perhaps in the world – highly approve our plan’.¹⁷ Superbly represented in court by the brilliant advocate Thomas Erskine (who had defended Paine when he was tried in absentia in 1792), the accused had also been powerfully defended in print by Godwin, whose pamphlet Cursory Strictures on the Charge delivered by Lord Chief Justice Eyre to the Grand Jury dissected the treason charges, leaving them in tatters. (Coleridge may well have read Godwin’s Strictures, which were reproduced in the Morning Chronicle.) Though the government had raided the homes of the radicals and seized their papers, the searches had failed to turn up incriminating evidence of a conspiracy. The Attorney-General, Sir John Scott (later Lord Eldon), resorted to petulant tears in his attempt to persuade the jury to convict – but in vain. As one after another of the defendants was acquitted, it became clear that the government had overreached itself. Pitt himself was subpoenaed by the defence and humiliated in the witness box. After several successive acquittals, charges against the remaining prisoners were dropped.

The verdicts were a triumph for the resurgent radical cause. On their release, the radicals – among them Thomas Hardy, founder of the London Corresponding Society, the orator and writer John Thelwall, and the pamphleteer John Horne Tooke – were greeted as heroes. Coleridge celebrated with a sonnet in honour of Erskine, the first of a sequence of eleven ‘Sonnets on Eminent Characters’ published in the Morning Chronicle from 1 December onwards. Most of his subjects were prominent liberal or radical figures, such as Priestley, Godwin and Sheridan,* but he also wrote a sonnet honouring William Lisle Bowles, the poet he had admired so much as a schoolboy, and even a sonnet to Southey. One sonnet was devoted to Tadeusz Kościuszko, the Polish patriot who had led the armed resistance to the partition of his country; another, unlike the others scathingly critical, to a subject who, though unnamed, was obviously (‘foul apostate from his father’s fame’) the Prime Minister.

Coleridge had returned to Jesus after a week in the capital, but early in December he again left Cambridge for London, this time never to return. Once more he based himself at the Salutation and Cat, where, as one story has it, he attracted so many listeners that in recognition the landlord provided him with free lodging.† Here Coleridge was reunited with another former Christ’s Hospital pupil, Charles Lamb, who was to become one of his closest friends. They had known each other at school – but not intimately, since Lamb was three years younger. Indeed Lamb had hero-worshipped Coleridge, whose schoolboy eloquence was such that it could make the casual passer-by pause in the cloisters and stand entranced. Lamb was a lovable figure, gentle and delicate. A severe stutter provoked indulgent affection rather than derision from his schoolmates. Slightly built, with spindly legs and a shambling gait, the legacy of childhood polio, Lamb habitually dressed in worn black clothes, giving him the appearance of a country curate recently arrived in town. The austerity of his dress was relieved by what Hazlitt (a painter) later described as his ‘fine Titian head’: his curly hair, his startling eyes, each a different colour, and his characteristic expression of droll amusement. Though nervous and shy, and prone to depression, Lamb had an independent mind, fine critical judgement, a strong sense of the ludicrous and a teasing wit. Like Coleridge, he had been a ‘Grecian’, but circumstances had not enabled him to attend university, and he now supported his parents and his elder sister Mary by working as a clerk in the East India Office. In the evenings he unwound in convivial conversation, smoking and drinking, sometimes heavily. After Coleridge had left London Lamb would cherish the memory of their comfortable evenings together by the fire in the Salutation and Cat, drinking ‘egg-hot’* and smoking Oronoko.† Like Coleridge he was a sincere Christian, and at this time of his life was strongly drawn to Unitarianism. Coleridge particularly admired Lamb’s devotion to his sister Mary, whose mind was ‘elegantly stored’ and her heart ‘feeling’.¹⁸

On 16 December Coleridge dined with the two editor-proprietors of the Morning Chronicle. Also present was Thomas Holcroft, known for his dogmatism and fierce argumentativeness. It was immediately obvious that Holcroft had not been impressed when Lovell visited him in Newgate, and he launched into a violent attack on Pantisocracy. Coleridge was not overawed, at least not in the version he relayed to Southey:

I had the honour of working H. a little – and by my great coolness and command of impressive Language certainly did him over – /Sir (said he) I never knew so much real wisdom – & so much rank Error meet in one mind before! Which (answered I) means, I suppose – that in some things, Sir! I agree with you and in others I do not.¹⁹

Holcroft invited Coleridge to dine at his house four days later. Among the other guests was Godwin himself, then at the zenith of his powers. ‘No one was more talked about, more looked up to, more sought after,’ wrote Hazlitt of this period many years afterwards, ‘and wherever liberty, truth, justice was the theme, his name was not far off.’ Though there is no detailed record of their conversation, Godwin noted in his diary afterwards that the talk was of ‘self love & God’. One can be confident that Coleridge – only twenty-two years old – held his own against these two formidable middle-aged men, one an atheist, the other ‘inclined to atheism’. In a letter to Southey some months earlier he had remarked of Godwin, ‘I think not so highly of him as you do – and I have read him with the greatest attention.’²⁰

Coleridge rejected one of Godwin’s essential tenets: of an antithesis between ‘universal benevolence’ and personal or private affections. In support of his argument Godwin cited the example of Brutus* – a cult figure in revolutionary thought – who pro patria sentenced his own sons to death, for plotting to restore the monarchy. Coleridge’s thinking on this subject was the very opposite of Godwin’s: ‘The ardour of private Attachments makes Philanthropy a necessary habit of the soul. I love my Friend – such as he is, all mankind are or might be!’²¹

Just at this moment, Coleridge received a belated reply from Mary Evans. It is not clear what she wrote – but he decided that it was a brush-off. He was calm, he told Southey:

To love her Habit has made unalterable…. To lose her! – I can rise above that selfish Pang. But to marry another – O Southey! bear with my weakness. Love makes all things pure and heavenly like itself: – but to marry a woman whom I do not love – to degrade her, whom I call my Wife, by making her the Instrument of low Desire – and on the removal of a desultory Appetite, to be perhaps not displeased with her Absence! … Mark you, Southey! – I will do my Duty.²²

For seven weeks or more Southey had been ‘in hourly expectation’ of Coleridge. He renewed the pressure on his friend, who had been promising for at least three weeks to return to Bristol ‘within a day or two’. Coleridge protested that he was ‘all eagerness’ to leave town, and resolved to be in Bath by the following Saturday (3 January 1795).²³ But on 2 January he wrote a frantic letter to Southey, full of excuses: the roads were dangerous, the inside of a coach unhealthy, the outside too cold, he had no money, he had a sore throat. Finally he offered to come by wagon, sharing it with four or five calves, wrapped up snugly in the hay. Southey and Lovell walked more than forty miles to Marlborough to meet the wagon – ‘but no S.T. Coleridge was therein!’ Southey wrote irritably to Sara Fricker: ‘Why will he ever fix a day if he cannot abide by it?’²⁴ He decided to fetch Coleridge from London himself.

Mathews wrote to Wordsworth announcing the abandonment of the periodical scheme. He once again encouraged Wordsworth to come to London and earn a living writing for the newspapers. Wordsworth replied that he had decided to come when he could. But he would only feel happy working for an opposition paper, he told Mathews, ‘for really I cannot in conscience and in principle, abet in the smallest degree the measures pursued by the present ministry. They are already so deeply advanced in iniquity that like Macbeth they cannot retreat.’²⁵ Wordsworth’s bitterness against Pitt and his fellow ministers is remarkable, and lasted long after his radicalism had shrivelled – it was obvious even as he wrote The Prelude, a decade later:

Our shepherds (this say merely) at that time

Thirsted to make the guardian crook of law

A tool of murder …

He believed them blind to the lesson of the Terror:

Though with such awful proof before their eyes

That he who would sow death, reaps death, or worse,

And can reap nothing better, childlike longed

To imitate – not wise enough to avoid,

Giants in their impiety alone,

But, in their weapons and their warfare base

As vermin working out of reach, they leagued

Their strength perfidiously to undermine

Justice, and make an end of Liberty.²⁶

Wordsworth joined Mathews in rejoicing at the verdicts in the treason trials: ‘The late occurrences in every point of view are interesting to humanity. They will abate the insolence and presumption of the aristocracy by shewing it that neither the violence, nor the art, of power, can crush even an unfriended individual.’ Wordsworth was further cheered by signs of a shift in opinion in favour of a negotiated peace with France.²⁷

‘I begin to wish much to be in town,’ he informed Mathews; cataracts and mountains are good occasional society, but they will not do for constant companions.’²⁸ Like Coleridge, he was intrigued by developments in the capital.* While Raisley Calvert lingered on, Wordsworth felt unable to leave him; but he quit Penrith almost immediately after Calvert’s death in early January 1795, and a few weeks later he was in London. Straight away, it seems, he found himself at the centre of radical discussion. On 27 February he took tea at the house of William Frend, who had moved to London after his expulsion from Cambridge and was now teaching pupils privately (among them the future social philosopher Thomas Malthus). Also present were eight others, all radicals, including Holcroft, Dyer and Godwin. This was a high-powered gathering of writers, lawyers and university Fellows. These radicals were closely interconnected through a multitude of personal and institutional links, shared interests and beliefs. A majority of those present were Cambridge men, at least two were Unitarians, and several were members of either the Society for Constitutional Information or the London Corresponding Society. Wordsworth, though new to this group, was not a stranger: he had known some of the younger men at Cambridge, George Dyer had been an old friend of his schoolmaster William Taylor, and Holcroft had reviewed his poems (unfavourably) in the Monthly Review. Another of those present, James Losh, a Cambridge friend of Wordsworth’s, had been in Paris late in 1792, and the two of them may have met there, perhaps at the dinner of expatriate Englishmen at White’s Hotel where a toast to Tom Paine had been drunk. Losh and Wordsworth had a further connection in that both came from Cumberland.

Wordsworth called on Godwin the very next day (probably by invitation), and then again ten days later, when he was invited to breakfast. For Wordsworth, to be able to converse tête à tête with the famous philosopher made an exhilarating change from hours spent at Raisley Calvert’s bedside, unable to talk with or even read to the dying young man. During the previous year he had been spouting Godwinian ideas; now he could drink them fresh from the source. This was the time when, according to Hazlitt, Wordsworth urged a young student, ‘Throw aside your books of chemistry, and read Godwin on Necessity.’ Over the coming months Wordsworth called on Godwin a number of times, usually alone, but twice with Mathews, and on one of these occasions also with Joseph Fawcett. Godwin paid Wordsworth the compliment of calling on him too, suggesting that he valued Wordsworth’s company: further evidence, perhaps, of the favourable impression this young man made on others.

Wordsworth’s poetry written in this period shows a strong Godwinian influence. In particular, drawing on Godwin’s philosophical novel The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), he planned to rewrite his Salisbury Plain poem to show how ‘the vices of the penal law and the calamities of war’ could lead an otherwise innocent man to commit the most terrible of crimes.²⁹

Southey bundled a protesting Coleridge onto the Bristol coach, and stood guard over him until they reached their destination. There the two founding Pantisocrats settled into cheap lodgings with George Burnett while they considered their next move. The scheme was not going to plan. There had been no further recruits, and they had not managed to raise anything like enough money to fund their emigration – barely any money at all, in fact (The Fall of Robespierre had not sold so well as hoped). Southey was now in favour of taking a farm in Wales, as a less ambitious venture. When he had first proposed this back in early December, Coleridge had dismissed it as ‘nonsense’. Now, demoralised, he accepted the revised plan.

The immediate need was to earn some money. While in London Southey had tried to interest publishers in his Wat Tyler, but all had declined for fear of prosecution. Coleridge toyed with a number of alternatives, including returning to London to work as a reporter for the Telegraph, and going to Scotland to act as tutor to the sons of the Earl of Buchan. But both of these meant abandoning Sara, and now that they were together again Coleridge found that he did not want to leave her – indeed, very much the opposite. He discovered, too, that she had attracted the attentions of two other men, one of them of large Fortune’, and that she was being pressed by her relatives to accept this suitor if Coleridge would not marry her first. Naturally this discovery increased Coleridge’s interest.

Very quickly it was decided that Coleridge should give a series of public lectures in Bristol’s Corn Market, capitalising on his qualities as an orator by charging a shilling a head in attendance money. The idea may have been inspired by the example of John Thelwall, who since his acquittal had been drawing large audiences – as many as eight hundred at a time – for his political lectures (though even so he found it hard to find a venue that would take him). Coleridge’s first lecture was written at a single sitting, under Southey’s supervision, between midnight and breakfast time of the day on which it was to be delivered. The lectures blasted Pitt’s repressive government and condemned its war against Revolutionary France, earning Coleridge a local reputation as a dangerous radical. He revelled in the notoriety: ‘Mobs and Mayors, Blockheads and Brickbats, Placards and Press gangs have leagued in horrible Conspiracy against me.’ Soon after delivering the first lecture he published this as a pamphlet, claiming he felt ‘obliged’ to do so, ‘it having been confidently asserted that there was Treason in it’. He triumphed over hecklers, and proudly announced to Dyer that he had succeeded in provoking ‘furious and determined’ opposition from ‘the Aristocrats’, to the extent of hiring thugs – ‘uncouth and unbrained Automata’ – who threatened to attack him. After the second lecture it was felt necessary to move the third to a private address – and even then a crowd gathered outside could scarcely be restrained from attacking the house on Castle Green where the ‘damn’d Jacobine was jawing away’.³⁰

Coleridge was an amusing lecturer, and his talks were both well attended and enthusiastically received. He dealt cleverly with hecklers. On one occasion ‘some gentlemen of the opposite party’, disliking what they heard, began to hiss. Coleridge responded instantly: ‘I am not at all surprised, when the red hot prejudices of aristocrats are suddenly plunged into the cool water of reason, that they should go off with a hiss!’ His witty riposte was greeted with ‘immense applause’. There was no more hissing after that.

The lectures were crafted to appeal to the sentiments of the dissenters who formed the majority of Bristol’s radical population. Coleridge likened the People to the blinded Samson, standing between ‘those two massy Pillars of Oppression’s Temple, Monarchy and Aristocracy’; they needed guidance. While deploring revolutionary violence, he insisted on the need for reform to prevent such violence occurring. The ‘great object in which we are anxiously engaged’ was ‘to place Liberty on her seat with bloodless hands’. All this was meat and drink to Bristol’s radicals, who were further cheered by his second lecture, ‘On the Present War’, which referred to ‘the distressful stagnation of Trade and Commerce’, and its woeful effect on the poor in particular:

War ruins our Manufactures; the ruin of our Manufactures throws Thousands out of employ; men cannot starve; they must either pick their countrymen’s Pockets – or cut the throats of their fellow-creatures … If they chuse … the former, they are hung or transported to Botany Bay. And here we cannot but admire the deep and comprehensive Views of our Ministers, who having starved the wretch into Vice send him to the barren shores of New Holland to be starved back again into Virtue.

Soon afterwards, Southey began delivering a course of twelve historical lectures on the background to the French Revolution. Each lecturer helped the other; it was a joint endeavour in suitably Pantisocratic style. ‘We live together and write together,’ Southey reported happily. ‘Coleridge is writing at the same table; our names are written in the book of destiny, on the same page.’³¹

In London Coleridge had tried to place a volume of his poems, but most of the booksellers would not even look at them, and the only offer he received was a derisory six guineas. Here in Bristol, Cottle generously offered him thirty guineas, to be paid in advance as required. ‘The silence and the grasped hand, showed that at that moment one person was happy.’³² Coleridge began collecting his poems and composing new ones for a volume to appear later in the year. Southey was still completing his long historical epic Joan of Arc, to which Coleridge contributed 255 lines and ‘corrected’ the rest. Cottle commissioned handsome portraits of both young authors by Peter Vandyke, a supposed descendant of the Flemish master.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the popularity of Coleridge’s lectures, he was ‘soon obliged by the persecutions of Darkness to discontinue them’.³³ Undeterred, a group of prominent Bristol dissenters commissioned him to deliver a fresh course of six lectures on revealed religion at the Assembly coffee house on the Quay.³⁴ Drawing on the ideas of Unitarian thinkers such as Frend and Priestley, Coleridge denounced the corruption of the Church of England. He ridiculed the dogma of the Trinity, and rejected the doctrine of the Redemption. For Coleridge, the teaching of Jesus Christ called for the complete abolition of private property – a measure too extreme for even the wildest Jacobins.* Indeed, passages from his sixth and final lecture sound like a manifesto for Pantisocracy:

The necessaries of twenty men are raised by one man, who works ten hours a day exclusive of his meals. How then are the other nineteen employed? Some of them are mechanics and merchants who collect and prepare those things which urge this field Labourer to unnatural Toil by unnatural Luxuries – others are Princes and Nobles and Gentlemen who stimulate his exertions by exciting his envy, and others are Lawyers and Priests and Hangmen who seduce or terrify him into passive submission. Now if instead of this one man the whole twenty were to divide the labor and dismiss all unnecessary wants it is evident that none of us would work more than two hours a day of necessity, and that all of us might be learned from the advantages of opportunities, and innocent from the absence of Temptation.

The lectures demonstrate the central importance to Coleridge of Christian revelation, an emphasis that distinguished him from radicals such as Thelwall. Indeed, Coleridge was repelled by the atheism and apparent immorality of many of the most prominent radicals, and appalled that such men might capture the leadership of the people. He was particularly concerned at the ubiquity of Godwin’s ideas in the minds of radicals. In the process of writing these lectures Coleridge sought to develop a Christian alternative to Godwin’s atheistic radicalism.³⁵ Much of his opposition to Godwin stemmed from his (brief) personal experience of the man, and of Godwin’s close associate Holcroft. There is a pugnacious tone to his criticism of Godwin, which suggests rivalry: ‘I set him at Defiance.’

Coleridge also delivered two stand-alone lectures, one, ‘by particular desire’, devoted to a subject particularly controversial in Bristol: a condemnation of the slave trade. Coleridge’s final lecture was on Pitt’s recently introduced hair-powder tax, a fine subject for his satirical wit, as democrats chose to wear their hair unpowdered anyway. Only ‘aristocrats’ would pay the guinea necessary for a licence to wear hair powder.

Meanwhile, all was not well in the Pantisocratic household. Coleridge exasperated Southey by his erratic working habits. Southey was by nature disciplined and organised, Coleridge wayward and chaotic. Even Coleridge’s appearance irritated Southey: untidy, unkempt and sometimes not entirely clean.³⁶ The strain began to show. Coleridge had agreed to give the fourth of Southey’s historical lectures – ‘On the Rise, Progress, and Decline of the Roman Empire’ – as it was a subject which he had particularly studied. At the end of Southey’s third lecture, therefore, it was announced that Coleridge would be giving the next. When the time came, ‘the room was thronged’ – but the lecturer failed to appear. After waiting half an hour, the disgruntled crowd dispersed. Coleridge was eventually found in his lodgings, smoking a pipe, deep in thought.

The next day, on a ramble up the Wye Valley with Cottle and the two Fricker sisters, Southey remonstrated with Coleridge. The two friends quarrelled, embarrassing Cottle, especially when each of the sisters entered the argument in support of her suitor. Afterwards, in the woods above Tintern, they lost their way as darkness descended, with Coleridge riding ahead on Cottle’s horse and shouting back encouragement, while Southey advanced supporting a sister on each arm, and the lame Cottle hobbled along behind, until at last they reached the inn.

Southey’s zeal for Pantisocracy was cooling. His priorities had changed; marriage to Edith was now in the forefront of his mind, and other considerations subsidiary. He began to express reservations about aspects of the scheme. Coleridge perceived his diminishing enthusiasm, and strove to keep him true to the principles to which they had devoted themselves. Southey was caught in a trap of his own making. Having advertised his own integrity so freely, having laid such stress on principle, having insisted to Coleridge that Pantisocracy was a duty, he found it difficult to withdraw. A succession of impassioned arguments ensued, followed by partial reconciliations. Each man accused the other of behaving coldly towards him. Strong words were exchanged, and tears shed. One night, just before they went to bed, Southey confessed that he had acted wrongly. But soon his manners became cold and gloomy again. It was like the break-up of a marriage. Poor George Burnett was a spectator of this contest; he watched aghast.

Then a wealthy friend offered Southey an annuity of £160, to begin the following autumn. Now that he had the prospect of some property, Southey found himself less inclined to share it. He put forward a new proposal: everything in Wales should be owned separately, except five or six acres. Coleridge reacted with indignation and contempt; Southey’s scheme amounted to rank apostasy: ‘In short, we were to commence Partners in a petty Farming Trade. This was the Mouse of which the Mountain Pantisocracy was at last safely delivered!’ From this time on, Coleridge kept up the appearance of a friendship with Southey – ‘but I locked up my heart from you’.

In August, Southey’s clergyman uncle Herbert Hill returned to England from Portugal. He had funded Southey’s education at Westminster and Oxford in the expectation that his nephew would follow his example, and he now wrote urging Southey to take Holy Orders. Apparently Hill was intimate with a bishop, and a post worth £300 a year was Southey’s for the asking. Southey informed his fellow lodgers of the offer one evening. ‘What answer have you returned?’ asked Coleridge. ‘None – Nor do I know what Answer I shall return,’ replied Southey, and retired to bed. Coleridge was incredulous; Southey had been as scathing as he was on the iniquity of the Church – indeed, had been so before they met (in December 1793, for example, Southey had written that to enter the Church ‘I must become contemptible infamous and perjured’³⁷). Burnett sat gaping, half-petrified at the possibility that his idol might abandon them. Coleridge wrote a letter to Southey that same night, frantically urging him not to ‘perjure himself’. The next morning he walked with Southey to Bath, insisting on the ‘criminality’ of such an action. Southey wavered, tempted by the prospect of a regular income that would at last allow him to marry Edith. After a struggle, he decided against the Church; but his uncle was determined to lure him away from Pantisocracy. Further inducements were placed in front of Southey to return to Oxford and study law – a course that Coleridge described as ‘more opposite to your avowed principles, if possible, than even the Church’. The temptations were proving too great for Southey, whose scruples disappeared one by one. He was now talking of ‘rejoining Pantisocracy in about 14 years’, citing Coleridge’s ‘indolence’* as a reason for his quitting. On 22 August 1795 Coleridge wrote bitterly to Cottle that Southey ‘leaves our Party’. On 1 September Southey quitted their shared lodgings in College Street. Their landlady was reduced to tears at his departure.

A week or two later Coleridge made his way back to west Somerset. On 19 September Poole’s cousin Charlotte noted in her journal that Tom had with him a friend by the name of ‘Coldridge: a young man of brilliant understanding, great eloquence, desperate fortune, democratick principle, and entirely led away by the feelings of the moment’. A poem by Poole (not known as a poet) addressed to ‘Coldridge’ – ‘Hail to thee, Coldridge, youth of various powers!’ – is dated seven days earlier. Presumably Coleridge stayed the intervening week with Poole at Nether Stowey. He may have visited Henry Poole at Shurton Court as well, because some time during September he composed a poem nearby, at Shurton Bars, where a murky, gently shelving sea recedes with the tide to reveal a shingle beach, broken by bars of exposed rock. ‘Lines Written at Shurton Bars’ was a response to a letter from Sara, in which she seems to have referred to chilly treatment from Southey and Edith. The growing estrangement from Southey was obviously prominent in Coleridge’s thoughts at the time. Poole’s poem refers to the same subject. On his return from Shurton to Bristol, Coleridge encountered Southey, who offered his usual handshake. Coleridge took Southey’s outstretched hand, and shook it ‘mechanically’. The significance of this handshake, or lack of it, subsequently became a point of contention between them.

In ‘Lines Written at Shurton Bars’ Coleridge quoted an expression borrowed from Wordsworth’s ‘An Evening Walk’. Such borrowing was a form of acknowledgement much practised at the time, and in fact Coleridge had already used another phrase of Wordsworth’s elsewhere.³⁸ A note to the published version of Coleridge’s poem would refer to ‘Mr. Wordsworth’ as ‘a Poet whose versification is occasionally harsh, and his diction too frequently obscure; but whom I deem unrivalled among the writers of the present day in manly sentiment, novel imagery, and vivid colouring’.³⁹ Obviously Coleridge had read and admired Wordsworth’s otherwise neglected poems published in 1793. What is striking about this note is that he should have rated Wordsworth so highly, on the evidence of so little.

Coleridge had decided to marry Sara. Though his addresses to her had at first been paid ‘from Principle not Feeling’, now his heart was engaged: ‘I love and I am beloved, and I am happy!’ He had found a cottage for them at Clevedon, a dozen or so miles west of the city, overlooking the Bristol Channel, for the modest rent of £5 per year. There they would live with George Burnett, the object of the Susquehanna delayed but not yet wholly abandoned. There Coleridge set ‘The Eolian Harp’, the first of what have since become known as his ‘conversation poems’, written in blank verse and usually addressed to an intimate companion, in which contemplation of nature evokes associated feelings, and leads to the resolution of an emotional or psychological problem. It would be hard to overstate the influence of these poems on Wordsworth and the later Romantic poets, and indeed on lyric poets ever since.⁴⁰ Some critics have argued that they are not so original as has sometimes been claimed; that Coleridge drew on earlier poets such as Cowper and Thomson. But many great writers have plundered the past. And even if this new style of poetry did have its antecedents, it was Coleridge’s conversation poems that shaped the future.

‘The Eolian Harp’ opens with Coleridge seated, Sara’s cheek resting on his arm, outside the cottage which will be theirs when they are married, gazing up at the evening sky. The scent of flowering plants fills the air, while the sea murmurs in the distance. Sensuousness permeates the poem, suffusing it with tender eroticism. Everything is in harmony, and Coleridge meditates on the conceit of the Aeolian harp, a stringed instrument that plays as the wind blows though it. Coleridge was fascinated by Hartley’s* belief that all sensation in the body takes place by means of vibrations along the nerves, like the strings of a musical instrument, and that each vibration leaves a trace that can be detected by the memory. Coleridge imagines ‘all of animated Nature’ as ‘organic harps’ that ‘tremble into thought’ as a divine ‘intellectual breeze’ blows through them. In the conclusion of the poem, Sara gently bursts the philosophical bubbles that arise within his ‘unregenerate mind’, and in doing so, lovingly leads this ‘sinful and most miserable man’ back to his maker. Thus erotic fulfilment is linked with redemption; the conflict between sacred and profane love is resolved.

On 4 October† they were married in Bristol’s St Mary Redcliffe, the vast church where Chatterton had claimed to have found Rowley’s manuscripts. Southey was not present at the wedding. He was still in an agony of indecision. He could not face Coleridge; they passed each other in the street without acknowledgement. In a letter he accused Coleridge of having withdrawn his friendship – though to others he maintained that Coleridge was more his friend than ever. Tongues were wagging in Bristol; Southey charged Coleridge with gross misrepresentation and wicked and calumnious falsehoods’. He complained to Grosvenor Charles Bedford that Coleridge had ‘behaved wickedly towards me’.⁴¹ Cottle attempted to reconcile them, without success. Southey’s uncle suggested an escape from his quandary: six months’ stay in Lisbon while he pondered his future. He hoped to prise his nephew away from an unfortunate attachment. Edith nobly pressed him to go, as did Southey’s mother. But he did not want it to be thought that he had abandoned Edith. Without telling his uncle, he married her ‘with the utmost privacy’ and left for Portugal a few days later.

Coleridge learned of this plan only a couple of days before. Wounded and angry, he sat down to denounce his former friend in a long, indignant, devastating letter:

O Selfish, money-loving Man! what Principle have you not given up? – Tho’ Death had been the consequence, I would have spit in that man’s Face and called him Liar, who should have spoken the last sentence concerning you, 9 months ago. For blindly did I esteem you. O God! That such a mind should fall in love with that low, dirty, gutter-grubbing Trull, WORLDLY PRUDENCE!!

To Robert Lovell, Southey had cited Coleridge’s indolence as his reason for quitting Pantisocracy, a thrust against a vulnerable part. ‘I have exerted myself more than I could have supposed myself capable,’ protested Coleridge – not just on his own behalf, but on Southey’s too. He instanced his contribution to Joan of Arc and his exertions to improve the remainder: ‘I corrected that and other Poems with greater interest, than I should have felt for my own.’ He had devoted his ‘whole mind and heart’ to Southey’s lectures: ‘you must be conscious, that all the Tug of Brain was mine: and that your Share was little more than Transcription’. He conceded that Southey wrote more easily:

The Truth is – You sate down and wrote – I used to saunter about and think what I should write. And we ought to appreciate our comparative Industry by the quantum of mental exertion, not by the particular mode of it: By the number of Thoughts collected, not by the number of Lines, thro’ which these Thoughts are diffused.

He retraced the history of their ‘connection’: ‘I did not only venerate you for your own Virtues, I prized you as the Sheet Anchor of mine!’ He detailed the ‘constant Nibblings’ that had ‘sloped your descent from Virtue’. Again and again, he said, he had been willing to give Southey the benefit of the doubt: ‘My Heart was never bent from you but by violent strength – and Heaven knows, how it leapt back to esteem and love you.’

Once Southey had allowed himself to be tempted by the Church, Coleridge had ceased to confide in him: ‘I studiously avoided all particular Subjects, I acquainted you with nothing relative to myself … I considered you as one who had fallen back into the Ranks … FRIEND is a very sacred appellation – You were become an Acquaintance, yet one for whom I felt no common tenderness.’ But now everything between them was at an end: ‘This will probably be the last time I shall have occasion to address you.’ He never expected to meet another whom he would love and admire so much. ‘You have left a large Void in my Heart – I know no man big enough to fill it.’⁴²

Perhaps through Godwin, Wordsworth met Basil Montagu, a young lawyer who was reading for the Bar. Though near contemporaries at Cambridge, they seem not to have known each other then. Now they rapidly became friends. Montagu was the illegitimate son of the fourth Earl of Sandwich, then First Lord of the Admiralty, and his mistress, the singer Martha Ray; in 1779 she had been shot outside a theatre where she had been performing by a disappointed suitor, the Reverend James Hackman, vicar of Wiveton in Norfolk, who had been hanged as a result. The story of Montagu’s mother’s murder had been a sensational scandal, recently revived by James Boswell in his Life of Johnson (1791). Poor Montagu was dogged by tragedy; his wife, whom he married soon after quitting Cambridge – against the wishes of his father, who never spoke to him again* – had died in childbirth, leaving him with an infant son, also called Basil. In the wreck of his happiness Montagu was ‘misled by passions wild and strong’; but his careful new friend gently but firmly led him away from these. ‘I consider my having met Wm Wordsworth the most fortunate event of my life,’ Montagu wrote in a memoir.

Montagu introduced Wordsworth to another recent Cambridge graduate, Francis Wrangham, who like Montagu was taking pupils in order to make ends meet. In 1793 – the year of Frend’s trial – Wrangham had failed to obtain an expected Cambridge Fellowship because he was rumoured to be friendly to the French Revolution. Since then he had been ‘vegetating on a curacy’ in Cobham, Surrey, where Wordsworth and Montagu often visited him. Wrangham was another radical, and a would-be poet; he had been in correspondence about his poetry with Coleridge, whom he had known at Cambridge. Now he and Wordsworth began collaborating on a verse satire based on Juvenal – a scholarly form of protest, which Wordsworth later abandoned.

By the summer of 1795, shortage of funds was becoming acute. After almost six months in London, nothing had come of Wordsworth’s plans to write for the newspapers, and none of the money from Raisley Calvert’s legacy had yet materialised. Four and a half years after leaving Cambridge, Wordsworth still had no career, no income and no home of his own. Perhaps worst of all, he was not writing. As Dorothy put it, ‘the unsettled way in which he has hitherto lived in London is altogether unfavourable to mental exertion’.⁴³ Meanwhile they still hoped to make a home together. Dorothy had not returned to Forncett, and was staying with friends in the north. There was an idea that she might come to London, and live by translating – a proposal which her Aunt Rawson dismissed as mad’.

Montagu and Wrangham had two young pupils, Azariah and John Frederick Pinney, whose father John Pretor Pinney was a wealthy ‘West Indian’, a Bristol merchant with extensive plantations on Nevis, a sugar-producing island in the Caribbean. As well as a handsome townhouse in Bristol, Pinney Senior owned Racedown Lodge, a large country house in north Dorset. This was not much used by the family, and had been advertised to let (at £42 per annum) as early as 1793, without finding a taker. The younger Pinney now suggested that Wordsworth might like to have it, rent free, with the proviso that he and his brother might come down for the occasional stay, principally to shoot.

Wordsworth seized the offer. Here was a chance to escape from the city, where things had not turned out as he had hoped. In the country, free from temptation or distraction, he could settle down to work. Moreover, it was an opportunity to live with Dorothy; Racedown would be ‘our little cottage’. There they could live simply and frugally, keeping a cow and growing vegetables in the kitchen garden. Dorothy would attend to most of the domestic chores, with the help of only one maidservant (she hoped for ‘a strong girl’). Together they would care for young Basil Montagu, whose father would pay £50 a year for his keep. There was a prospect of at least one other child, a little girl, and perhaps another boy as well, one of the younger Pinney brothers, then in his early teens. Dorothy was fond of children and had experience of looking after them. For her, this was a chance at last to ‘be doing something’:

… it is a painful idea that one’s existence is of very little use which I really have always been obliged to feel; above all it is painful when one is living upon the bounty of one’s friends, a resource of which misfortune may deprive one and then how irksome and difficult it is to find out other means of support, the mind is then unfitted, perhaps, for any new exertions, and continues always in a state of dependence, perhaps attended with poverty.⁴⁴

Outlining the arguments in favour of the Racedown ‘scheme’ to her friend Jane Pollard (who had recently married John Marshall, a linen manufacturer), Dorothy argued that it would give her brother ‘such opportunities of studying as I hope will be not only advantageous to his mind but his purse’. She hoped that it ‘may put William into a way of getting a more permanent establishment’.⁴⁵

With the money for the two children, and interest on the capital from Raisley Calvert’s legacy (which was at last beginning to trickle through), Dorothy was confident of an annual income of at least £170 or £180. This should be enough to enable them to live comfortably, and even to make some provision for the future.* There was the prospect of a further £200 a year if her brother’s ‘great hopes’ of having the Pinney boy entrusted to him as tutor were realised.

It was agreed that Wordsworth would travel to Bristol, where he would stay at the Pinneys’ house in Great George Street until Dorothy was able to join him and they could journey on together to Racedown. No doubt John Pretor Pinney wanted to take a good look at this young man who would be occupying his country house. For Wordsworth, there was the added benefit of an opportunity to make new contacts in a city with its own flourishing intellectual life. Among those he met in Bristol, almost in passing, was a young man who had been making a good deal of noise, and whose name he had almost certainly heard already, †

Nobody knows for certain where or when Wordsworth and Coleridge first met, what the circumstances were, or what was said. There are three contradictory stories, each based on reminiscences long after the event. The confusion is not altogether surprising; it is often hard to remember how we met someone who afterwards becomes familiar. Though these two would later become so important to each other, they could scarcely have anticipated this at their first encounter.

What is known is that they met in Bristol during Wordsworth’s five-week stay in the city from around 21 August until 26 September 1795. The proof is in a letter Wordsworth wrote to Mathews from Racedown in October: ‘Coleridge was at Bristol part of the time I was there. I saw but little of him. I wished indeed to have seen more – his talent appears to me very great.’⁴⁷ There is a tradition that the two met at John Pretor Pinney’s house, where Wordsworth was staying, but this may be no more than a guess. One reason for doubting it is the awkwardness of Coleridge’s being received at the house of a prominent ‘West Indian’ only a few months after delivering a public lecture condemning the slave trade. The Bristol Observer had commented on the lecture as ‘proof of the detestation in which he [Coleridge] holds that infamous traffic’. It is hard to imagine Coleridge comfortable as the guest of one of the largest slave-owners in the city, or that Pinney would have welcomed him into his home.

Fifteen years later, the painter Joseph Farington noted in his diary that the two poets had met at a political debating society, ‘where on one occasion Wordsworth spoke with so much force & eloquence that Coleridge was captivated by it & sought to know Him’.⁴⁸ His note was based on a conversation with Lady Beaumont, a woman who had come to know both men well (but who had not known them at the time); though one might suspect that in being told to her, and then by her, the story had become garbled, and that Coleridge rather than Wordsworth had been the speaker. Another cause for doubt is the explanation of how they became acquainted. Coleridge was on record as an admirer of Wordsworth’s poetry; he would not have needed to hear Wordsworth speak in order to want to know him.

Half a century afterwards, Wordsworth tried to recall the circumstances of the meeting for Coleridge’s daughter Sara. Confessing that he did not have ‘as distinct a remembrance as he could wish’, he told her ‘the impression upon his mind’ was that he had seen her father and her mother together with her uncle Southey and her aunt Edith ‘in a lodging in Bristol’.⁴⁹ If Wordsworth’s memory can be relied upon, the Frickers’ home in Redcliffe Hill seems the most likely location for the meeting – though why Wordsworth should have been there remains unexplained. One should remember that at this stage neither of the couples was married. The Fricker sisters had attracted plenty of unpleasant comment because of their association with the Pantisocrats; they would surely not have wanted to risk their reputations further by visiting the young men’s cramped bachelor lodgings in College Street.⁵⁰

There is another difficulty with the story. ‘I met with Southey also,’ Wordsworth continued his letter to Mathews – which makes it sound as if this happened on a different occasion. By now relations between Coleridge and Southey were strained; Coleridge later claimed to have used the most scrupulous care’ to avoid Southey after his return from Shurton in mid-September. Wordsworth went on to describe Southey’s qualities: ‘his manners pleased me exceedingly and I have every reason to think very highly of his powers of mind … I recollect your mentioning you had met Southey and thought him a coxcomb. This surprises me much, as I never saw a young man who seemed to me to have less of that character …’ At Southey’s invitation Wordsworth read some passages of Joan of Arc, then in press; and Southey contributed a couple of lines to Wordsworth’s Juvenalian satire – which Wordsworth later told Wrangham were the two best verses in it.⁵¹ This sounds like a relaxed encounter, more relaxed than one might have expected had Coleridge been there at the same time. Perhaps, then, Wordsworth’s memory should not be relied upon, and in fact he met Coleridge and Southey separately.

Despite so much uncertainty, the available fragments of evidence make it possible to date their meeting to within the space of only a few days.

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