Adam Sisman - The Friendship - Wordsworth and Coleridge

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