Charles, who had faithfully awaited Coleridge’s “reappearing star”, greeted this historic return with his usual mixture of affectionate concern and hilarity. “His health is tolerable at present, though beset with temptations…He has two volumes together at Bristol, both finished as far as the composition goes; the latter containing his fugitive Poems, the former his Literary Life. – Nature who conducts every creature by instinct to its best end, has skilfully directed C. to take up his abode at a Chemists Laboratory in Norfolk Street. She might as well have sent a Hulluo Librorum [Bookworm] for cure to the Vatican. – God kept him inviolate among the traps & pitfalls. He has done pretty well as yet.”2
Actually Coleridge had fallen straight back into heavy opium-dosing, overcome with the stress and excitement, and within a week was in bed and summoning John Morgan from Calne to help him. For the first time his pains and breathlessness suggested symptoms of the chronic heart disease which would steadily undermine his health in these later years. “My heart, or some part about it, seems breaking, as if a weight were suspended from it that stretches it, such is the bodily feeling, as far as I can express it by words.”3
Crabb Robinson, also hearing of the Prodigal’s return, tracked him down at Lamb’s on 6 April. He thought Coleridge had been drinking, but seemed “mystically eloquent”; while Morgan looked “very pale” and worried by his charge. “He attends Coleridge with his unexampled assiduity and kindness.” He was impressed by reports of all Coleridge’s work at Calne – “I am told he has written popularly and about himself” – but was alarmed that he was “printing without a publisher”. He also noted that Hazlitt had been reviewing a translated volume of Schlegel’s Lectures very knowledgeably in the Examiner, and foresaw the coming critical clash in the reviews which would cause a very different, but no less damaging, kind of heartache for Coleridge.4
The moment Morgan arrived at Norfolk Street he found Coleridge a new physician, Dr Joseph Adams, “an old acquaintance”, who had some knowledge of addiction. The case was urgent, but obviously delicate. Accordingly, on 6 April Dr Adams wrote from his surgery in Hatton Garden to James Gillman, a newly elected member of the Royal College of Surgeons. Gillman had just set up his practice, and lived in a large family house on the southern slopes of Highgate, three miles north of London.
The letter was discreet but pointed.
Dear Sir, a very learned, but in one respect an unfortunate gentleman, has applied to me on a singular occasion. He has for several years been in the habit of taking large quantities of opium. For some time past, he has been in vain endeavouring to break himself off. It is apprehended his friends are not firm enough, from a dread, lest he should suffer by suddenly leaving it off, though he is conscious of the contrary; and has proposed to me to submit himself to any regime, however severe. With this view, he wishes to fix himself in the house of some medical gentleman, who will have courage to refuse him any laudanum, and under whose assistance, should he be the worse for it, he may be relieved. As he is desirous of retirement, and a garden, I could think of no one so readily as yourself.
Dr Adams did not mention Coleridge’s name, but added that he was “of great importance” as a literary man, and that his “communicative temper” made his society very interesting. Gillman replied non-committally, but agreed for an interview to be arranged one “evening” during the coming weekend.5
In the interval, Coleridge despatched “his excellent and faithful friend” Morgan to Byron’s house in Piccadilly, with the manuscript of Zapolya. In an accompanying letter, he at last admitted the cause of all the delays at Calne. His Lordship would consider Coleridge “an inexplicable Being” unless he understood that for fifteen years he had been an addict – “I refer to the daily habit of taking enormous doses of Laudanum” – and had viewed life “thro’ the magic glass of an opium-poisoned imagination”. He was now about to embark on a cure, he hoped, with “a respectable surgeon and Naturalist” at Highgate. He added some details about Zapolya, now described as “a Christmas Tale” which might require some “re-plotting” for Drury Lane. Finally, he appended a learned note on Werwolves, which were currently interesting Byron. Coleridge of course knew all about them, and could refer his Lordship to a passage in Drayton’s The Man in the Moon where we are advised to approach them “with hallowing charms”. Perhaps addicts were similar creatures.6
How could Byron have resisted this introduction? He read Zapolya straight through that night, and urged Coleridge to rise from his lair the following morning. The invitation was all the more remarkable since Byron was, as it turned out, frantically busy: not only was he conducting a clandestine affair with Shelley’s friend and future sister-in-law, Claire Clairmont; but he was preparing to leave England forever in less than a fortnight.
2
The single, momentous meeting between the two poets took place on 10 April 1816. Byron was at his most winning: he flattered, praised and joked, making remarks – not recorded – that Coleridge said were “enough to make one’s hair bristle”. He convinced Coleridge to do what he had put off for a decade, to publish “Christabel” in its unfinished state. He also somehow charmed out of him the story of “Kubla Khan” and got him to recite the poem in his drawing-room. When Coleridge dismissed it as “a psychological curiosity”, Byron waved the objection aside and urged him to publish that too.7
Quite unknown to Coleridge, this recital was witnessed by another writer waiting in a next-door room – none other than Leigh Hunt. Hunt later recalled: “He recited his ‘Kubla Khan’ one morning to Lord Byron, in his Lordship’s house in Piccadilly, when I happened to be in another room. I remember the other’s coming away from him, highly struck with his poem, and saying how wonderfully he talked. This was the impression of everyone who heard him.”8
The enchantment was mutual, for Coleridge in turn was dazzled by Byron, his wit, his physical beauty, and the extraordinary expressiveness of his features. “If you had seen Lord Byron,” he later wrote, “you could scarcely disbelieve him – so beautiful a countenance I scarcely ever saw – his teeth so many stationary smiles – his eyes the open portals of the sun – things of light, and for light – and his forehead so ample, and yet so flexible, passing from marble smoothness into a hundred wreathes and lines and dimples correspondent to the feelings and sentiments he is uttering…”9
On Byron’s recommendation, John Murray came round to arrange a publishing contract at Norfolk Street two days later on 12 April. He indicated his willingness to become Coleridge’s general publisher. In the first instance he wished to publish a slim volume, sixty-four pages octavo, containing “Christabel”, “Kubla Khan”, and a third opium poem, “The Pains of Sleep”, to be issued with Prefaces as swiftly as possible the following month. For this he initially offered £60 (with reversion of copyright). However, alterations to the contract showed that (again probably through Byron’s influence) this was raised first to £70 and finally to £80.10 Murray also introduced Coleridge to John Hookham Frere, a translator of the classics as well as a diplomat, who would later help him financially. Coleridge described this introduction as “among the most memorable Red Letter Days of my Literary Life”.11
3
Coleridge took the local coach up from Tottenham Court to Highgate in the late afternoon of Friday, 12 April. To his delight he arrived outside the decorative iron railings of a substantial property, Moreton House, situated close to the parish church of St Michael’s with its tall spire, and overlooking gardens and wooded slopes running southwards in the evening sun. (The grounds below eventually became Waterlow Park and the extended wilderness of Highgate Cemetery.)
To the west lay the rural undulations of Hampstead Heath, the lakes and the Vale of Health, and the beautiful Palladian mansion of Kenwood House, then still the property of Lord Mansfield. In front stood the clustered houses of Highgate village, grouped round a trim little green, Pond Square, embowered in oak and elm trees. A few shops ran down Highgate Hill to the tollgate, including bak
ers, butchers, two taverns and (rather conveniently) T. H. Dunn’s the chemist. To the north lay open countryside.
When Coleridge was ushered in by a young laboratory assistant, James Gillman already had a visitor in his parlour, and was not in a hospitable mood. He was a tall, anxious, clever man, already overworked from a growing medical practice. At thirty-four, he had a household consisting of his wife Ann, two young sons James and Henry (the younger only two years old), and his wife’s sister Lucy Harding. He had, he later recalled, “no intention of receiving an inmate into my house”.
Dr Adams had already paid him a confidential visit, and they had discussed opium addiction and the danger and “frightful consequences” of attempting a detoxification regime. “I had heard of the failure of Mr Wilberforce’s case, under an eminent physician at Bath, in addition to which, the doctor [Adams] gave me an account of several others within his own knowledge.”
Gillman was primarily a physiologist, a disciple of the great surgeon John Hunter. His dissertation at the Royal College had been On the Bite of a Rabid Animal (1812). Yet unlike many physicians of the day he was something of an intellectual, fascinated by the new medical advances in France and Germany, and interested (as Coleridge quickly discovered) in the contemporary debate among leading London surgeons on Vitalism – the exact physiological nature of the life force in the human organism. Behind his shy and rather earnest professional exterior, lay a lively mind and, as it proved, an exceptionally kind and loyal heart.
Gillman had understood that Coleridge (probably incoherent, and possibly dangerous) would arrive escorted by Dr Adams. Instead “came Coleridge himself and alone”, instantly genial and talkative, charming and old-fashioned in his manners, courteous to Ann, and giving the extraordinary impression that he had known Gillman all his life. James Gillman could never afterwards account for this effect, though he described it very well. “We met, indeed, for the first time, but as friends long since parted, and who had now the happiness to see each other again. Coleridge took his seat – his manner, his appearance, and above all his conversation were captivating. We listened with delight, and upon the first pause, when courtesy permitted, my [other] visitor withdrew, saying in a low voice, ‘I see by your manners, an old friend has arrived…’”
Coleridge talked of his poetry, his travels and his medical history, and recited “some exquisite but desponding lines of his own” – the lines “To William Wordsworth” quoted at the end of Chapter 10 of the Biographia. The interview lasted about two hours, and Gillman was captivated. “I felt indeed almost spell-bound, without desire of release.”
He thought the previous medical opinions of Coleridge’s case were “unprofessional and cruel”, and that a detoxification regime could be managed without danger or excessive suffering if it were supervised over several weeks. Coleridge asked to come to Highgate immediately, as a paying guest and in-patient; and within “a few minutes” what normally would have “cost many hours to arrange” was fixed. Coleridge left Moreton House with the agreement that he should move in with the Gillmans the following Monday.12
Both men immediately had second thoughts. Gillman felt “deeply interested”, and rather flattered that someone “so highly gifted” should have sought him out, but he began to “reflect seriously on the duties imposed” and awaited the approaching day with “anxiety”. Coleridge in turn wondered if James Gillman fully realized what he had undertaken. The following morning he wrote a long letter to Gillman from Norfolk Street, reviewing their arrangement with great candour. He had been convinced within “the first half hour” that in matters of intellect they would be “reciprocally serviceable to each other”. But in the matter of opium, Gillman must beware. He would never tell a falsehood, but he was more than capable of acting a lie, “unless watched carefully”. His need to procure the drug would drive him to “Evasion, and the cunning of a specific madness”. Here Coleridge was humiliatingly frank, and showed great self-knowledge. “No sixty hours have yet passed without my having taken Laudanum – tho’ for the last week comparatively trifling doses…For the first week I shall not, I must not be permitted to leave your House, unless I should walk out with you. – Delicately or indelicately this must be done: and both the Servant and the young Man must receive absolute commands from you on no account to fetch anything for me.”
He also gave a penetrating sketch of his psychological state, when the drug was withdrawn. “The stimulus of Conversation suspends the terror that haunts my mind; but when I am alone, the horrors, I have suffered from Laudanum, the degeneration, the blighted Utility, almost overwhelm me.”13 If Gillman could effect a cure in these circumstances, and where so many others had failed, Coleridge would think of him, “with reverence”. Meanwhile, he intended to work as hard as he could, and trusted there would be no objection to John Morgan, his “literary Counsellor and Amanuensis” coming up each day from 11.30 to 3.30 in the afternoon. “I have been for so many years accustomed to dictate while he writes that I now cannot compose without him.”14
Coleridge moved into Moreton House, as agreed, on Monday 15 April 1816. Ever afterwards Gillman liked to say that Coleridge appeared at his door, “bringing in his hands the proof sheets of ‘Christabel’”. In fact the poem could not have been printed, even with Murray’s great efficiency, for another week. But it was an understandable blur of memory and myth-making, of the kind that Coleridge himself would frequently encourage in his noble doctor in the years ahead.
Lamb wrote a lively and faintly provoking account of Coleridge’s good fortune to Wordsworth (using the back of a weights and measures form from India House). Contrary to all the gloomy prognostications at Rydal Mount, Coleridge had risen from the dead again, and found powerful new supporters in London. “Coleridge is printing Xtabel by Lord Byron’s recommendation to Murray, with what he calls a vision Kubla Khan – which said vision he repeats so enchantingly that it irradiates & brings Heaven & Elysian bowers into my parlour while he sings or says it…” He loved the poem, but like Crabb Robinson foresaw trouble ahead in the reviews. He feared it would be attacked as “nonsense” when put into clear light of print: “an owl that wont bear daylight”. As to the Highgate arrangement, he also had his doubts. “He is at present under the medical care of a Mr Gillman (Killman?) a Highgate Apothecary, where he plays at leaving off Laudanum.”
But then Lamb’s loyalty to Coleridge, especially when writing to Wordsworth, burst forth in a magnificent declaration of praise. “Coleridge is absent but 4 miles, & the neighbourhood of such a man is as exciting as the presence of 50 ordinary Persons. Tis enough to be within the whiff and wind of his genius, for us not to possess our souls in quiet…I think his essentials not touched, he is very bad, but then he wonderfully picks up another day, and his face when he repeats his verses hath its ancient glory, an Arch angel a little damaged.”15
4
Coleridge’s life changed radically and permanently in these first months of 1816 at Highgate, and the detoxification regime was not a game. As agreed, Gillman strictly controlled his opium doses and also severely restricted his social life. Dining out in London was discouraged, except in exceptional cases, as when Hookham Frere arranged an 8 o’clock supper party for Coleridge to meet the future Foreign Secretary, George Canning.16
Coleridge’s early attempt to smuggle in laudanum, wrapped up in proofs from Murray, was quickly nipped in the bud. In late June he described to Morgan a typical evening of withdrawal, being overcome by “a sensation of indefinite Fear” which shook his whole frame. “I fought up against it and went to bed. I had a wretched night – and next morning the few drops, I now take, only increasing my irritability, about noon I called on G. for the performance of his part of our mutual engagement, & took enough and barely enough (for more, I am certain, would have been better) to break the commencing Cycle before the actual Craving came on. Today I am much better.” So he struggled on, like all addicts, coping day by day.17
A few suitable visitors were entertained �
�� Daniel Stuart came to dinner and arranged for some Courier articles – but other old roistering companions were evidently frowned upon. These included Lamb, who came in July expecting one of their bibulous soirees, and found Gillman virtually showing him the door. He was with Crabb Robinson in the parlour at Moreton House, getting Coleridge to hold forth about Goethe, when after barely half an hour, “Mr Gillman entered the room very much with the air of a man who meant we should understand him to mean: ‘Gentlemen, it is time for you to go!’ We took the hint…” Lamb, much piqued, said he would never call again; but Robinson admitted that he had never seen Coleridge look so well under his “sort of medical surveillance”. He talked “sensibly but less eloquently and vehemently than usual”. Secretly they both wondered if Coleridge’s special magic could actually survive, after all, without opium.18
For the first time in three years Coleridge began to write regularly to his wife. There was no more immediate money from the Murray contract, as most of it had been absorbed by “poor Morgan’s Necessities”, but he promised to send any profits from Zapolya for Hartley and the other children.19 Mrs Coleridge was not, however, disposed to be enthusiastic about Lord Byron and Murray. She wrote grumbling to Poole: “Oh! when will he ever give his friends anything but pain? he has been so unwise as to publish his fragments of ‘Christabel’ & ‘Koula-Khan’ [sic]. Murray is the publisher, and the price is 4s. 6d. – we were all sadly vexed when we read the advertisement of these things.”20
If Coleridge sometimes felt a captive in these early months at Moreton House, he loved the “delicious” walks round Hampstead Heath and took much pleasure in the walled garden where many of his later poems sprouted. He had “four gaudy Flower-pots” that he tended especially, and likened the riot of plants to a vast poetic dictionary: “there is formed for common use a vast garden of Language – all the shewy, and all the odorous Words, and Clusters of Words, are brought together…”21
Coleridge- Darker Reflections Page 51