Adam Sisman - The Friendship - Wordsworth and Coleridge

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.

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.