William Wordsworth

by Hunter Davies

  Coleridge was born in Ottery St Mary in Devon in 1772, the tenth child of the Vicar of Ottery, who died when Samuel was seven. When he was nine, he was sent away to school in London, to Christ’s Hospital, where he remained for the next eight years. He was a brilliant scholar, something of a child prodigy, but he was lonely and unhappy for much of his time at school, though he began a life-long friendship with a boy some three years younger than himself, Charles Lamb, and fell in love with a girl called Mary Evans, who was the sister of another school friend.

  He went up to Jesus College, Cambridge, as a sizar, in 1791—the year that Wordsworth went down—and started off there in excellent style, winning medals and prizes; but his enthusiasm for Cambridge soon waned. He devoted his time to talking, not working, to parties, radical politics and running up debts; then, when his girl friend Mary rejected him, he ran away from Cambridge and enlisted in the 15th Regiment of Light Dragoons, under the name of Silas Tomkyn Comberbacke. It was a defiant, melodramatic gesture of a sort which Coleridge increasingly took to when, as he often believed, the world and his friends didn’t quite understand him or had let him down. He was in the Dragoons as a private for several months, puzzling the officers by speaking Greek and pleasing his fellow privates by writing their love-letters, until at last his family tracked him down and persuaded him to return to Cambridge.

  He didn’t stay long at Cambridge, leaving at the end of the summer term in 1794 without taking a degree. He set off on a walking tour to Wales with a friend, stopping first of all at Oxford to see some old school friends. This stop stretched to three weeks, because in Oxford he met Robert Southey, then a student at Balliol. This was when they first became inflamed with their wonderful joint scheme of Pantisocracy.…

  Robert Southey was born in Bristol in 1774, the second of nine children of a local linen draper. When he was two, Robert was taken off by an aunt, Miss Tyler (his mother’s half-sister), a wealthy, snobbish, eccentric lady who decided she could give him a better home than his own impoverished father. He spent most of his childhood with this strange lady, sleeping in her bed with her till he was six years old. As she didn’t rise till about eleven, and he usually awoke at six, he was forced to lie for hours, staring at the ceiling. She wouldn’t let him play in the garden, for fear that he got dirty. It made for a rather dreary, lonely childhood, but it is supposed to have encouraged in him self-sufficiency and a sense of duty.

  Another relation, an uncle who was a clergyman, paid for Southey’s education. Like Coleridge, he was sent away to a London public school, Westminster, which, along with Eton, was considered the best of the day. Compared with the homely comforts of Hawkshead Grammar School, it sounds frightening. Older boys poured cold water in his ears when he was asleep and then held him out of a window by one leg. The curriculum was very old-fashioned, consisting mainly of Latin and Greek learned by rote, and the whole school of 250 boys was taught in one big room, divided down the middle by a curtain. Like Coleridge, Southey didn’t like his school, but made some good friends there.

  Southey’s memory of the news of the French Revolution—which happened when he was at Westminster—is very typical of young, idealistic youths of the day: ‘Few persons but those who have lived in it can conceive or comprehend what a visionary world seemed to open up. Old things seemed passing away and nothing was dreamt of it but the regeneration of the human race.’ He became a fierce radical, anti-Church, anti-government and against most forms of discipline, particularly his school’s. In 1792, he was expelled from Westminster for writing a violent attack on the school in a magazine he’d helped to found, the Flagellant. It was a full frontal attack on corporal punishment, saying that those who practised it (his reverend teachers) were worse than heathens and unfit to instruct youth. His headmaster not only expelled him but warned Christ Church, the Oxford college about to take him. ‘I will never submit,’ wrote Southey. ‘Should I be rejected at Oxford the grave is always open—there at least I shall not be molested.’ Ah, the passions of youth!

  Balliol took him instead, in a fit of liberalism, but just as he went up, in 1792, he had some family misfortune which clouded his next few years, just as happened with Wordsworth. His father, who’d never been much of a success as a draper (he really wanted to be a farmer), was arrested for debt. Miss Tyler, the dreaded aunt, rescued his father financially, but he fell ill and died within a few months. Southey’s mother was forced to start taking lodgers to survive.

  Southey was already a committed radical when he arrived at Oxford. One of his first acts of protest was to go into a formal dinner with his hair unpowdered. As we know from Wordsworth’s undergraduate days, powered hair was de rigueur. Barbers were on duty for two hours every morning, just to see to the young gentlemen. Pitt, whom all the radicals hated, had put a tax on powder, and this was the specific cause of complaint. (Next door, at Trinity, Walter Savage Landor, known to his contemporaries as the ‘Mad Jacobin’, also chose the same means of protest, though he and Southey never met till much later in life.)

  During the next two years, Southey continued to indulge in radical politics, refusing all pleas from his uncle, who was paying for his education, to go into the Church and settle down. He hated the Established Church. But he knew he would have no money whatsoever, unless he somehow kept in with his uncle, so he tried medicine one term, but gave up. He then tried the Civil Service, with no more luck. He’d been writing poetry at a furious rate since school and had started writing a dramatic epic poem, then the fashion with literary-minded undergraduates, based on the story of Joan of Arc but really a pro-Revolution diatribe. He fancied a literary career, but, with no private income, he had decided it was impossible. When Coleridge chanced into his life, during that summer vacation, Southey, with his final year looming up, had just resolved that the only solution was to emigrate. There seemed nothing else he could do in life.

  The finding of a kindred spirit, when Southey thought he was alone against the world, was a revelation. It all fitted in. They would set up their ideal community together. Coleridge, after three weeks of incessant chat, went off to complete his tour of Wales with his friend. Southey decided he might as well leave and not take his degree. As he was going off for ever to the New World, what was the point of a boring Oxford degree?

  He went home to Bristol, where Coleridge joined him, and they worked on plans for their new life in America. Southey introduced him to his Bristol friends, such as Robert Lovell, with whom he was writing a book of poems, and the three Fricker sisters. Mrs Fricker, the widow of a failed sugar-pan manufacturer, was a family friend. Robert Lovell was engaged to one of the Fricker girls. Southey started going out with another, Edith, and was soon about to become engaged. Coleridge became friendly with the third one, Sara. All six of them, the three young men and their three Fricker girls, declared themselves passionate Pantisocrats, all bound for America.

  It was a very fertile time for Southey and Coleridge. They sparked each other off and wrote numbers of poems and articles, sometimes literally together, doing alternate sections. Southey completed a dramatic poem about Wat Tyler, the early radical, which was accepted for publication but never appeared. Perhaps his publisher thought, wisely, that it would damage his reputation and his future.

  They went on walking tours together round the West Country. On one jaunt, to visit a wealthy tanner called Thomas Poole, an older, republican friend of Coleridge’s in Somerset, they were forced to spend the night sleeping in a garret. ‘Coleridge is a vile bed fellow,’ wrote Southey to a friend, ‘and I slept but ill. In the morning I rose—and lo! we were fastened in. They certainly took us for footpads and had bolted the door on the outside for fear we should rob the house.’

  They were a pretty alarming couple, in their political passions as much as in their appearance. Poole decided that, of the two young men Coleridge was the more fluent and talented, with striking abilities, but that he wasn’t very prudent, though he promised to be ‘as sober and rational as his most sober fri
ends could wish’. He found Southey less splendid in his abilities, but ‘more violent in his principles than even Coleridge himself’. Coleridge was at least a Unitarian, and believed in God, but Southey, so Poole found, had no religious views. ‘In religion, shocking to say in a mere Boy as he is, I fear he wavers between Deism and Atheism.’

  Towards the end of the year, 1794, Coleridge went off to London, to try and place some of their poems and to drum up interest and customers for Pantisocracy. He went back to his old school to see some of the senior boys, and spent a lot of time hanging around the ‘Salutation and Cat’ in Newgate Street, which meant that he wasn’t as sober as he might have been, spending many hours in ‘that nice little smoky room’, as Charles Lamb described it, ‘with all its associated train of pipes, tobacco, egghot, Welsh rarebit, metaphysics and poetry’.

  Coleridge tried to make contact again with Mary Evans, the girl who’d already rejected him—an occurrence which, in Coleridge’s case, always spurred him to greater protestations of love—but got nowhere. Instead, or perhaps at the same time, he started a flirtation with another young lady, a Miss Brunton—purely of course to help him get over the first love. ‘Her exquisite beauty and uncommon accomplishments might have cured one passion by another.’

  When Southey heard, he was most upset. Southey might not have held any religious views, but he was certainly a most moral young man, very keen on duty and principles. He wrote a severe letter to Coleridge, reprimanding him for his behaviour, telling him to come back to Sara Fricker, to whom he was as good as betrothed.

  Coleridge in turn accused Southey of being self-righteous: ‘Having never erred, you feel more indignation at error than pity for it. 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 desires, and on removal of a desultory appetite to be perhaps not displeased with her absence! Enough. Mark you, Southey! I will do my duty.’ But still he didn’t return, so Southey in the New Year went to fetch him. He came back quickly, and Southey and Coleridge moved into lodgings together in College Street, Bristol, where they remained for the next seven months, their friendship, their writing and their Pantisocracy as strong as ever.

  The numbers were growing and by now they included Mrs Southey (Robert’s mother) and Mrs Fricker, as well as Miss Tyler’s manservant, Shadrach Weeks, though Coleridge protested when he discovered that the others were proposing that ‘Shad’ should also be their servant in America, ridiculing the idea of ‘unequal equals’. However, that difference was settled and they each got down to the final business of getting their £125 together.

  A local bookseller, a young and enterprising man called Joseph Cottle, who’d already agreed to publish some of Coleridge’s and Southey’s poems, arranged a series of public lectures for them in Bristol, on politics and theology. Coleridge was a brilliant public speaker, immensely knowledgeable and fluent, and his lectures were very successful amongst the young radicals of Bristol. Southey was competent rather than sparkling but his lectures also did well. Coleridge asked to give an extra lecture in the series Southey was running, on the ‘Rise, Progress and Decline of the Roman Empire’, as he said it was a subject he had particularly studied. Southey agreed he could do it, but on the evening in question, Coleridge didn’t turn up and no lecture was given.

  The next day, they happened to be going on a little excursion to Tintern Abbey, given by Cottle for his two young protégés and their respective fiancées, Edith and Sara Fricker. After dinner, Southey brought up the subject of the missing lecture, and the most heated argument ensued. It went on for hours, with the two poets shouting at each other, the Fricker sisters hanging on to and defending their respective fiancés, while Cottle tried to calm things down. They lost their way coming home, as it was so late. Coleridge tried to go off on horseback for help—after all, had he not been a dragoon at one time—but they ended up having to spend the night in Tintern.

  This then was the state of play between the two young men when Wordsworth chanced to arrive in Bristol—and into their lives. William stayed at the house of Mr Pinney, the rich sugar merchant, for five weeks, and either met them there or perhaps attended their lectures. He was drawn to both of them, in just a few brief meetings, particularly to Coleridge, who had read, it turned out, his An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches and praised them highly. Coleridge had, coincidentally, discussed them at Cambridge with young Christopher Wordsworth, not knowing that he was eventually going to meet his brother.

  William wrote to a young London friend, Matthews, who already knew the two of them:

  Coleridge was at Bristol part of the time I was there. I saw but little of him. I wished indeed I had seen more—his talents appear to me very great, I met with Southey also. His manners pleased me exceedingly and I have every reason to think very highly of his powers of mind. He is about publishing an epic poem on the subject of the Maid of Orleans. From the specimens I have seen I am inclined to think it will have many beauties. 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 have less of that character.…

  Wordsworth, of course, didn’t know about the growing differences and rows between the two friends, which very soon afterwards led to the collapse of Pantisocracy. This took place during that summer, though there was no actual date when the scheme was called off. The two just drifted apart, as most of the participants began to realize that the whole idea was slightly mad and that temperamental differences, especially between Coleridge and Southey, would never allow it to work.

  Coleridge put the blame on Southey for the final collapse. Southey’s aunt, Miss Tyler, was absolutely furious when she heard about the scheme and about his engagement to the Fricker girl, whom she dismissed as a mere seamstress, not fit for her nephew, to whom she had devoted so many years and so much money. She said she would cut him off completely, would give him no more money and that she never wanted to see or hear from him again—and she never did.

  But Southey’s uncle, the cleric, still took an interest and suggested that he should now accompany him for a few months to Lisbon, where he was chaplain to the British community. This would enable him to get over his ridiculous schemes. Southey, surprisingly, agreed to the plan. At the same time, he was offered an annuity from a wealthy school friend which would start being paid the following year, when he came of age, and provide him with £160 a year.

  Coleridge cut Southey in the street in Bristol when he heard he was going to Portugal, but Coleridge nonetheless married his Fricker sister. He must have been keen enough on her by this time to be more than just doing his duty, but he later blamed Southey for forcing him into the marriage. Southey married his Fricker girl the next month, November 1795, and then left straight from the church doors for Portugal. So they became brothers-in-law just at the time when they’d ceased to be friends.

  Coleridge moved to a Somerset cottage with his bride and began work on a new magazine, feeling let down by Southey, whom he now considered even more of a self-righteous prig: ‘You are lost to me, because you are lost to Virtue.’

  Wordsworth, therefore, had come along at the perfect time, at least for Coleridge. Coleridge now had a new friend to take Southey’s place, someone equally radical, equally interested in poetry and literature, but without all that moralizing and censoriousness. It was true they’d hardly met in Bristol, but Coleridge got Wordsworth’s Dorset address and started corresponding. Coleridge was one of nature’s enthusiasts, a man of instant passions, who enjoyed all the pleasures. After those first brief meetings, he’d already decided that in Wordsworth he’d met a giant.

  Racedown Lodge is a square-built house near the hamlet of Birdsmoor Gate, about half-way between Lyme Regis and Crewkerne in the rolling Dorset downs. The coast is about six miles away—within sight, if you pick a good day and a reasonable mound. The country isn’t wild, like
the Lake District fells, and in fact today the hills seem positively cosy and suburban, with the influx of retired gentlefolk and a summer stream of Cortinas on all the roads. But in 1795, when the Wordsworths arrived, it was wild in the sense of being isolated and undeveloped. The scattered farming communities led a rather lonely, impoverished life. William and Dorothy were both much struck by the poverty of the local peasants, many of whom lived in primitive huts, begging or stealing to keep themselves alive. In the Lake District valleys, surrounded by the high fells and forced to be self-sufficient, the people of the small towns and villages somehow coped better with their poor and deprived.

  We are now at Racedown [wrote William], and both as happy as people can be who live in perfect solitude. We do not see a soul. Now and then we meet a miserable peasant in the road. The country people here are wretchedly poor; ignorant and overwhelmed with every vice that usually attends ignorance in that class, viz, lying and stealing.

  We plant cabbages and if retirement, in its full perfection, be as powerful in working transformations as one of Ovid’s Gods, you may suspect that into cabbages we shall be transformed.…

  They got no newspapers and, worst of all for Dorothy, considering her passion for letter-writing, they were miles from a post office. All provisions had to come from Crewkerne, seven miles away. But they were together, sharing the same simple pleasures, walking, gardening, hedging, reading and, most of all, working. William had written very little poetry in the previous two years, what with all his radical agitation in London, and, fuelled and cosseted and inspired by Dorothy, his secretary and kindred soul, he now set to work with a renewed energy. Unfortunately, his head was still full of turbulent ideas about revolution and violence, all mixed up with his own mental and moral dilemmas, and the poetry of this period suffered in consequence. It seemed to be something he had to work out of his system, though Dorothy, who had little interest in philosophical topics, was gradually weaning him back to nature.