Coleridge- Darker Reflections

by Richard Holmes

  At different Periods of my Life I have not only planned, but collected Material for many Works on various and important Subjects: so many indeed, that the Number of unrealized Schemes, and the Mass of my miscellaneous fragments, have often furnished my friends with a Subject of Raillery, and sometimes Regret and Reproof…I am inclined to believe, that this Want of Perseverance has been produced by Overactivity of Thought, modified by a Constitutional Indolence…I was still tempted onward by an increasing Sense of the Imperfection of my knowledge, and by the Conviction, that, in order to fully comprehend and develop any one Subject, it was necessary that I should make myself Master of some other, which again as regularly involved a third, and so on, with an ever-widening Horizon. Yet one Habit, formed during long Absences from those, with whom I converse with full Sympathy, has been of Advantage to me – that of daily noting down, in my Memorandum or Common-place Books, both Incidents and Observations; whatever had occurred to me from without, and all the Flux and Reflux of my Mind within itself. The Number of these Notices, and their Tendency, miscellaneous as they were, to one common End (what we are and what we are born to become) first encouraged me to undertake the Weekly Essay…28

  This declaration was followed by a fabulous list of possible essay subjects. They ranged from the elevated and philosophical – “Ground of Morality as distinguished from Prudence”, or “Origins of the Moral Impulses”; through the cultural aspects of Politics, Poetry, Painting, Gardening, Music, Foreign Literatures, Education and Travel; to the chatty “Characters met with in real Life”. All these did eventually appear at some point in The Friend. Coleridge also added a mysterious final paragraph, hinting at the metaphysical depths he had plumbed in Malta. The Friend would provide: “Sources of Consolation to the Speculative Gloom afflicted in Misfortune, or Disease, or Dejection of Mind, from the Exertion and right Application of Reason, the Imagination, and the Moral Sense; and new Sources of Enjoyment opened out…”29

  He received much correspondence in reaction to the Prospectus. Jeffrey objected to the phrase “Speculative Gloom”; Southey thought there was an “affectation of Humility in the Style”; and others simply doubted that he could possibly sustain a weekly publication. But Coleridge persisted, writing cheerfully to Davy on 7 December: “My Health and Spirits are improved beyond my boldest Hopes. A very painful Effort of moral Courage has been remunerated by Tranquillity – by Ease from the Sting of Self-disapprobation. I have done more for the last 10 weeks than I had done for three years before.”30

  In this and other letters he also again talked of his conquest of opium addiction, writing to Stuart’s partner T. G. Street: “if I entirely recover, I shall deem it a sacred Duty to publish my Case, though without my name – for the practice of taking Opium is dreadfully spread.” He now realized it was a common addiction among working people “throughout Lancashire and Yorkshire”, and a local chemist told him he sold “three Pound of Opium, & a Gallon of Laudanum” each market day. He thought he might even campaign for “legislative Interference”.31

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  The Friend was due to start publication in January 1809, and Coleridge felt “a quickening and throb in the pulse of Hope”.32 But around him at Allan Bank doubts were hardening. Wordsworth was embarked on a quite different journalistic venture, a long political pamphlet attacking the Convention of Cintra (August 1808), by which the government had “shamefully” allowed Napoleon to evacuate the Spanish peninsula. He wanted Coleridge’s help with this, and wrapped up in parliamentary reports and party political debates, regarded The Friend as something of a dilettante distraction. He recommended it to Walter Scott and others, but without much enthusiasm.33

  Dorothy hoped for success, but shrewdly observed Coleridge’s erratic preparations. “Dear Coleridge is well and in good spirits, writing letters to all his friends and acquaintances, dispatching Prospectuses, and fully prepared to begin his work. Nobody, surely, but himself would have ventured to send forth this Prospectus, with not one essay written, no beginning made but yet I believe it was the only way for him.” She also saw the shadow of opium darkening again in the long winter nights. “I cannot, however, be without hauntings of fear, seeing him so often obliged to lie in bed more than half of the day – often so very poorly as to be utterly unable to do anything whatever. Today, though he came down to dinner at three perfectly well, he did not rise till near two o’clock.”

  Yet Coleridge’s Notebooks suggest he was reading hard through these solitary nights, and making “Hints for The Friend”.34 However ill he seemed in the mornings, he was “cheerful and comfortable at night”, and had persuaded Asra to work alongside him sometimes in his study. Dorothy blessed the tranquillity of these evenings, when something of the old harmony had returned, and Coleridge had rejoined the circle. “Sara and he are sitting together in his parlour, William and Mary (alas! all involved in smoke) in William’s study, where she is writing for him (he dictating)…Mr De Quincey is beside me, quietly turning over the leaves of a Greek book…”35

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  But this studious calm was short-lived, and Coleridge was soon plunged into a labyrinthine series of problems concerning the technical production of The Friend. These threatened to bring the whole enterprise to a halt, exactly as the sceptics had predicted. Much energy and persistence over the next six months was required to overcome them, involving dozens of letters and endless visits to printers. They turned on three essential questions: how should the paper be financed, where should it be printed, and how should it be distributed?

  Coleridge originally thought that all these had been solved by his agreement with William Savage, the London printer for the Royal Institution. Savage would finance and handle the production, distribute through booksellers, and take 5 per cent of the profits.36 But in mid-December he received a letter from Savage outlining an entirely different plan. Savage wanted a monthly, mass circulation paper, selling for sixpence, advertised by “at least 1,000” prospectuses, and with a distinctly political character. Moreover he wanted 50 per cent of the profits, “and the power of printing it…in any subsequent editions”.37

  All these terms went against Coleridge’s conception of The Friend, and Daniel Stuart advised that the financial conditions “would have led you into a gulph of debt or obligation; they are most ruinous…You would have been like a Young Girl who gets into a Bawdy House.”38 Savage was dismissed, and the first postponement of the launch date, to February 1809, followed.

  The next scheme, following Stuart’s advice, was to find a local printer at Kendal. But this would involve distributing the paper by direct post, which required the purchase of government stamped paper, and the lodging of financial sureties. It took over a month to investigate these matters. Coleridge took a brief break with Hartley over the New Year, visiting the Lloyd family at Old Braithay.

  Here seventeen-year-old Agatha Lloyd observed father and son with a candid, teenage eye. Coleridge was clearly a “genius”, with strong paternal affections and “extraordinary” powers of mind and conversation. “But in his domestic habits I do not wonder at his being a very trying husband.” Hartley, upon whom his father doted blindly, was actually very odd: “painfully out of the common way both in mind and constitution”. Their visit was exciting but disruptive, and made Miss Agatha long for the return of the “quiet fireside” of their own family life.39

  When Coleridge returned to Allan Bank, he found Asra ill and Wordsworth deep in a deadline crisis with his Cintra pamphlet, a synopsis of which was being serialized in the Courier. Stuart had asked for immediate rewrites, and Coleridge worked from eleven in the morning till 3 a.m. the next day producing an expanded text, which was posted at dawn and published on 13 January 1809.40 This journalistic feat convinced Stuart of Coleridge’s unshaken powers to produce the fast copy that The Friend would require, just as it brought home to Coleridge the extreme impracticality of the scheme without rapid and regular communications with London.

  “It is not once in ten times, that we ca
n answer by the same post, that brings the Letter…the bitterness of the raw frosty wind made it impracticable for me to walk three miles to & three miles back again so as to meet the Letter-carrier at Rydale, at ten o’clock at night…[Wordsworth] has twice walked out to the Carrier’s House after two in the morning…”41

  He now pinned his hopes on getting the paper printed by Matthew Pennington, “the worthy old Bookseller and Printer of Kendal”, who had produced the original Prospectus. Stuart, who was now completely committed to the project, agreed to obtain supplies of stamped paper, and carried an advertisement for The Friend to begin in March 1809. Wordsworth and Southey, seeing Coleridge’s determination, agreed to pledge £200 each as sureties.42

  Coleridge wrote triumphantly to Poole that all was now prepared, despite “vexations, hindrances, scoundrelisms, disappointments”. Though the stamped paper would make “a most villainous diminution of my profits”, the basic mechanics of the paper were set up. “The Friend will be stamped as a Newspaper, and under the Newspaper Act – which will take 31/2d from each Shilling but enable the Essay to pass into all parts & corners of the Empire without expence or trouble – it will be so published as to appear in London every Saturday Morning, and be sent off from the Kendal Post to every part of the Kingdom by the Thursday Morning’s Post…The money is to be paid to the Bookseller, the agent, in the next town, once in twenty weeks.”43

  On 3 February he rode over to Kendal to finalize the arrangements. Here old Mr Pennington announced that he had decided to retire from business, and there was no one nearer than Liverpool who could take over the work.44 Coleridge postponed his launch date till 1 April 1809.

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  Within a week he had conceived his next plan. He would set up his own press at Grasmere, print The Friend and also a luxury edition of the classics. De Quincey, who had now moved into Dove Cottage, would be co-opted on to the scheme, as a particularly suitable assistant. “Besides his erudition, he has a great turn for manual operations, and is even to something of old bachelor preciseness accurate, and regular in all he does. It is his determination to have printed under his own Eye immaculate Editions of such of the eminently great Classics, English and Greek as most needs it – and to begin with the Poetic Works of Milton.”

  Old Pennington – whom Coleridge still spoke of with great fondness, “a Genius, and mighty indifferent to the affairs of this Life” – had already costed the plan at £100 for “the Fonts of Type, the Press, and the Fitting-up etc.”45 Another long letter shot off to Stuart about typefaces, letter-founders and press makers. “I assure you, dear Stuart! that I am faint and sick at Heart with these Alps upon Alps of Hindrances, and Uncertainties.” But he would cross them yet.46

  The idea of Coleridge running the Grasmere Press (a strange avatar of Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press) is historically intriguing, and not altogether unlikely. He had been closely involved with the print production of the Watchman in Bristol thirteen years before; and Sir Alexander Ball had asked him to do something similar with the Gazette in Malta. But the scheme was not favourably received at Allan Bank, where De Quincey was increasingly involved with proof-corrections to the Cintra pamphlet which would take him to London for most of the spring. Stuart thought it delightful but unwise, and wondered if they should fall back on a monthly publication issued by Longman in London.47 But Coleridge insisted on the “weighty arguments” that required a weekly format.48 He had now heard of an alternative printer, a young man called Brown, who had just started business at Penrith.

  Half-way through a letter of 11 February, he abruptly broke off to follow up this new scheme, rushing off through the snow over Kirkstone Pass. The first part of the journey took him five hours on foot, including a bad fall on the ice. He took up his letter again five days later. “While writing the last sentence, I received a letter from Penrith, that Brown was both able & willing to print and publish The Friend – in consequence on Sunday I walked from Grasmere over the Mountains (O Heaven! what a Journey!) hither – and arrived at last limping, having sprained my knee in leaping a Brook…However I am perfectly satisfied with Brown’s character, proposals, & capability.”49 The only slight difficulty remaining was that John Brown had no suitable typeface to print the paper. But this was a mere detail. Coleridge instantly sent to Wilson’s of Glasgow for “a small Pica font”, which cost him £38 less £2 discount.50

  Coleridge now shifted his base of operations to Penrith, to deal with the final hurdle of the stamped paper. Dorothy regretted the move at such a “critical moment”, fearing illness or opium: “If he had been able to stay quietly here the trial would have been a fair one…but then there is the affair of the Stamps, and what plague besides I know not, and he is so easily overturned – made ill by the most trifling vexations or fatigue.”51

  Yet by 17 March Coleridge was able to write to Stuart: “Every thing here is ready – the Printer, the Publisher, the Type, the Bonds etc. – I have more than 300 subscribers, tho there have been no advertisements – and eagerly have I hope to hear from you concerning the paper…” He hoped this could be obtained on credit from Fourdrinier Stationers in Lombard Street, but wrote to Bernard at the Royal Institution to have the £60 balance on his lectures (still unpaid) transferred direct to Stuart’s account. “O dear friend! on this business my whole Prospect is set – I pray you, do set me going – I am ready with Essays full & written out – I can begin whenever the paper arrives…” Stuart duly dispatched 1,250 sheets “by the wagon for Penrith” on 25 March, expecting it to arrive in eight days.

  Coleridge now set his launch date for 1 May 1809.52

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  Meanwhile he hoped to increase his subscribers to 500. Stuart had given him a rough estimate of his financial margins: 250 subscribers would cover his costs; 500 would bring him a profit of £300 at the twentieth issue; 1,000 would bring £800.53 The Friend looked financially viable, and Coleridge wrote to Wordsworth that he should not involve himself in further journalism after the Cintra pamphlet for the sake of money. Wordsworth should not “withdraw himself from poetry”, since he could “get money enough” for both of them.54 However, Wordsworth confided bleakly to Poole: “I cannot say that Coleridge has been managing himself well; and therefore would not have you disappointed if The Friend should not last long; but do not hint a word of this to any body, as any thing of that kind should it come to his ears would completely dash him.”55

  But Coleridge was dashed by problems other than the increasing pessimism at Allan Bank. The Penrith wagon service, a rustic affair designed for local grocers rather than London journalists, did not deliver its precious cargo of paper for five weeks. In the interval, Coleridge went down with mumps, which prostrated him for much of April. Significantly, he retired not to Allan Bank but to Greta Hall, where Mrs Coleridge nursed him and Southey was unexpectedly encouraging.

  Coleridge wrote to Poole with intense frustration: “just as I was beginning to enjoy the delight of composing the Numbers (& delightful I really did find it, compared with the misery of writing and reading letters of business, of travelling to & fro & hither & thither) but I was seized with a complaint in my Left Ear, heat, confusion, dull throbbing, turbid echo, & deafness, with the most intolerable dejection – utter despondency.”

  Once diagnosed, however, he cheered up again, moved his launch date to mid-May, and suggested that Poole contribute an essay to The Friend on the “delightful” subject of how to live happily on an income of £20,000 a year.56 Then he crawled off to convalesce on the country estate of the local member of parliament, J. C. Curwen, whom he somehow convinced to lend free parliamentary franking on all business letters associated with the paper.

  Still worried by the prospect of financing his first twenty issues, he also took the extreme step of offering the “absolute copyright” in all his poems – including the “Mariner” – to Longman for the derisory sum of £120.57 Nothing could better show his complete, and even reckless, commitment to The Friend at this stage; especially beari
ng in mind that he had recently negotiated with Longman for a £100 payment on a single edition of just one of Wordsworth’s poems. Longman replied on 4 May that his publishing house was “fearful that £120 is rather more than can be afforded”, and the ruinous counter-offer of £100 was rejected by Coleridge after much heart-searching.58 Meanwhile Stuart reassured him that the Royal Institution’s £60 (paid at long last) would cover further supplies of stamped paper, and Coleridge’s outstanding debts of £100 could wait.

  The subscribers’ list now stood at 500, including no less than twenty-eight members of parliament (among them the Foreign Secretary, George Canning), several bishops, many university dons, and a solid phalanx of the professional middle-class – doctors, lawyers, architects, bankers, businessmen, soldiers, clerics and schoolmasters.* Notable names among the literary and artistic world also included Walter Savage Landor, Benjamin Robert Haydon, William Bowles, Francis Jeffrey, Walter Scott, James Montgomery, Thomas De Quincey, Henry Crabb Robinson, and, rather suitably, the pioneer of aviation Sir George Cayley. And of course there were numerous old friends: Captain Pasley from Malta days; John Morgan; Sir George Beaumont; Thomas Clarkson; Josiah Wedgwood; John Prior Estlin; and even Coleridge’s two brothers George and James at Ottery.

  The launch date was set definitely for 1 June 1809.

  At the end of May Coleridge secretly retired to the cottage of one of his Quaker friends, Thomas Wilkinson, who lived at Yanwarth just outside Penrith. Here he abstained from all opium and alcohol for a week, and made the final preparations for his first three essays. Dorothy later called Wilkinson, “even at the last, the Father of The Friend”.59