A PASSIONATE SISTERHOOD
The Sisters, Wives and Daughters of the Lake Poets
KATHLEEN JONES
Table of Contents
Preface: On the Other Side of the Glass
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Part One: Brothers and Sisters
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A Book Mill Publication
Published by The Book Mill at Smashwords
Copyright © Kathleen Jones 2011
Copyright © Kathleen Jones 1997
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
First published in Great Britain by Constable and Company Ltd, 1997
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ISBN 978-0-9567303-0-5
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The Book Mill is an imprint of Ferber Jones Ltd
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About The Author
Kathleen Jones was born and brought up on a hill farm in the Lake District. After spending some years in Africa and the Middle East, where she worked in English broadcasting, she returned to Cumbria where she now lives with sculptor Neil Ferber. She has four children and writes full-time, working occasionally as a creative writing tutor. Her published work includes seven biographies, A Glorious Fame: The Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (Bloomsbury 1988); Learning not to be First: The Life of Christina Rossetti (Oxford University Press 1991); A Passionate Sisterhood (Constable 1997); Catherine Cookson: The Biography (1999);Margaret Forster: An Introduction (Northern Lights 2003); Seeking Catherine Cookson's Da (Constable 2004); and Katherine Mansfield: The Story-teller (Penguin NZ 2010); short fiction (for which she has received a number of awards), journalism and two collections of poetry Unwritten Lives, (Redbeck Press 1995) and Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21 (Templar Poetry 2011).
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Quotes from Reviewers
"It is the stuff your English teacher never told you . . . told with such enthralling vividness." VAL HENNESSY, Daily Mail
"I . . quickly became captivated. I think Kathleen Jones has done a great job. . And she has a good deal of passion herself, tho' strictly controlled. . . her use of quotes from the women's letters etc was what I admired most. I know to my cost how hard it is to do. Her choices were always judicious - and best of all, automatically urge the reader back to the source from which they came - the aim, I always think , of all biography. . . what a wonderful story it is." MARGARET FORSTER
" . . reading it becomes a gripping, almost addictive experience" ANGELA LEIGHTON, Times Literary Supplement
"Jones' group biography is a model of organisation and insight . . a lucid, calm and thoughtful account of how physical landscape shapes psychic and cultural space" Read More KATHRYN HUGHES Literary Review
"This is a fascinating, marvellous, utterly absorbing book" SUE LIMB ,Independent on Sunday
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Acknowledgements
The author acknowledges with gratitude the financial assistance of the Society of Authors and the Authors' Foundation in order to complete her research. Many individuals and organisations have given invaluable assistance to the author, supplied illustrations and granted permission to quote from manuscripts and books. Particular thanks must go to the staff of Penrith Library, Jeff Cowton and the staff of the Wordsworth Trust Library at Dove Cottage, the Dove Cottage Trustees, Mr and Mrs Peter Elkington and the Trustees of Rydal Mount, the Governors of Keswick School, Mrs A.H.B. Coleridge, Mrs Priscilla Coleridge Cassam, the research librarian of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre at the University of Texas at Austin, the staff of Coleridge Cottage, Richard Holmes, Molly Lefebure, Neil Ferber, Tony Riley, Richard Gollner and Carol O'Brien.
Every effort has been made by the author to contact the copyright holders of manuscripts and other published material, but in some cases no replies were ever received to communications sent. The author therefore apologises to anyone whose name has been omitted due to inadequate or out-of-date information. The source material has been fully acknowledged in every case.
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PREFACE
On the Other Side of the Glass
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Winter rain looked at
through the windows of great men
is still only rain.1
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To an eighteenth-century sensibility, the Lake District was not necessarily a desirable place to live in. Its wild, mountainous prospects and great beauty excited the romantic imagination. But the privations of life in so remote and barbaric a region - its rocks and 'torrents roaring' - could also induce a shudder of horror and offered little to the sophisticated tourist who required both bodily comfort and elegant diversion. It was these extremes that drew Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey north; their friend Charles Lamb preferred to remain in the civilised surroundings of a London street.
The Wordsworths lived at Grasmere, the Coleridges and Southeys 12 miles away at Keswick. The two households, linked initially by the friendship of the poets, remained close even after relations between the men deteriorated - bound together by the extraordinary tenacity of their wives and sisters. These six women, two groups of sisters, connected by blood and marriage, formed a series of passionate, triangular relationships. The three Fricker sisters, Sarah Coleridge, Edith Southey and Mary Lovell at Greta Hall, near Keswick, Dorothy Wordsworth and her childhood friends Mary (who married William) and Sara Hutchinson at Dove Cottage in Grasmere created a kind of extended family that kept the Lake Poets together long after they had ceased to be friends.
Inevitably their daughters - Dora Wordsworth, Sara Coleridge and Edith May Southey - thrown so much upon each others' company, formed close friendships and perpetuated the links.
The modern reader will be astonished by the distances they travelled, often on foot. Coleridge and the Wordsworths thought nothing of walking the 12 or 13 miles between Grasmere and Keswick to visit each other, sometimes in the dark. The roads were rough and often unmetailed. They were shod either in clogs -wooden soles with a leather shoe upper for rough walking - or stout shoes with a double leather sole. The cobbler's bill was one of their biggest expenses.
Sarah Coleridge and her sisters were city girls. Unlike Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth, they had little relish for vigorous exercise and the outdoor hazards of wind, rain and mud. Both Sarah and her sister Mary Lovell became very stout in middle age and found it an effort to walk even short distances. Visits to Grasmere were made either in a borrowed carriage or a 'returned chaise'.
Sara Hutchinson, too, had little fondness for long walks. A stroll along the garden terraces or the margins of the lake should, she felt, be enough exercise for anyone. Longer journeys were undertaken by coach or on horseback - sometimes on a 'double horse', a sturdy mount with a double saddle for riders in tandem. Only the rich had their own carriages. For long journeys the better off hired a chaise with post horses and post boys. Others bought a seat on a mail coach, travelling in cramped conditions and much discomfort. Cheaper seats were to be had outside on the roof exposed to the elements. For the poor there were slow rides in a carrier's cart sometimes pulled by oxen.
Horse travel was not without its hazards. Both William and Mary Wordsworth narrowly escaped serious injury when their carriages were overturned, and William was thrown from his horse more than once. Mary's cousin was permanently paralysed by just such an accident, and Sara Hutchinson was almost killed when the horse in front of her was struck by lightning.
It was perhaps inevitable that Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey should meet. They were of a similar age and inclination, aspiring poets and ardent democrats. They were introduced by mutual friends at university. All three men had been orphaned at an early age, and so were the women they married. This sense of loss and abandonment was another common bond. They clung together, not because of youthful ideals of community, but because they sought to recreate the security of family life. Their lives were financially precarious - all were dependent on the charity of friends to free them from the burden of earning a living in order to write. Wordsworth was left a legacy from his school friend Raisley Calvert to sustain himself and Dorothy; Southey was given an annuity by an Oxford contemporary, Wynn, and Coleridge was given a similar annuity by the benevolent Wedgwood brothers, whom he had met in the West Country.
To their families and more conventional acquaintances they were spongers - unwilling to take proper jobs to support themselves, scribbling the odd line of poetry, which paid little or nothing, lying in bed till lunchtime and wandering about the countryside like gypsies at all hours of the day and night, returning with torn, dirty clothes and broken shoes. The women they married had to take their share of the general atmosphere of disapproval.
Drawn together initially by marriage and friendship, forced on each others' society by geographical proximity, the women's relationships were far from harmonious. There was intense jealousy between Sarah Coleridge and Dorothy Wordsworth, the pivotal figures in the group. They had conflicting personalities. Dorothy was tall, lean, 'all fire and ardour', eyes 'wild and startling in a face of Egyptian brown'. Heedless of appearances, she transmitted intellectual energy to everyone around her and was credited by William with having awakened his senses to the beauties of nature. But this vivid creature, whose neighbours long remembered both her eccentricity and her kindness, had another side to her which she tried very hard to suppress. Her gentleness was paralleled by a ruthless streak that bordered on cruelty, a trait her brother described in an early draft of the poem 'Nutting', where he describes her slashing down the hazels: 'in truth/If I had met thee here with that keen look/Half cruel in its eagerness, those cheeks/Thus . . . flushed with a tempestuous bloom,/I might have almost deem'd that I had pass'd/A houseless being in a human shape,/ An enemy of nature'.2 Dorothy's love affair with her brother is one of the great literary relationships.
Sarah Coleridge was plump, 'in person full and rather below the common height', but always elegantly dressed, something Dorothy scoffed at behind her back. But Sarah was far from the domestic cipher often portrayed. She and her sister Edith were well educated and followers of Mary Wollstonecraft. It was their emancipated behaviour that caused Byron to remark sarcastically that Coleridge and Southey had 'married two milliners from Bath' - milliner being a contemporary euphemism for an immoral woman. Byron was also referring unkindly to the Fricker sisters' unfortunate circumstances, which had forced them to earn their own livings as seamstresses before they married.
Marriage was virtually the only career open to a respectable middle-class woman. It was extremely difficult to earn an independent living. As Mary Wollstonecraft pointed out, 'Few are the modes of earning a subsistence, and those very humiliating.' The poor worked on the land or in factories, or went into service. For the single middle-class woman lucky enough to have some education, the only careers were those of needlewoman or governess - or the more limited possibilities of the female author. There was little formal education, and universities and professions were barred to women until the latter part of the nineteenth century.
This situation often trapped women into positions of dependency, either on their husbands or on their families if they failed to marry. For those whose marriages did not turn out well there was no escape. Divorce and separation were rare, expensive and socially ruinous for women, who were usually forced to stay in unhappy, sometimes abusive relationships. It is not surprising to find that such claustrophobic emotional conditions caused considerable stress and adversely affected their general health. The Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth women were no exceptions.
Reading their diaries and letters, you begin to realise how much the issue of health dominated their lives. Minor ailments, meriting no more than a course of antibiotics or a couple of paracetamol today, confined them to bed and left them weak and ill. Childhood illnesses such as whooping cough and measles often killed both children and adults. Immunisation was in its infancy. Public hygiene was primitive and cholera and typhoid were realities of everyday British life.
Medical practice killed as often as it cured. Patients, already weakened by disease, were often bled to death. Another supposedly beneficial torture was 'blistering', where hot cups were applied to the skin producing a superficial burn. The pain and irritation of the wound distracted the patient from whatever other affliction they were suffering and gave them the illusion that the condition had improved.
The only pain-killers available were opiates, whose addictive properties were little understood. The most commonly used was laudanum - a distillation of opium in alcohol available in a number of different strengths. Large numbers of people became addicted to laudanum, including Coleridge, his daughter Sara, De Quincey and Dorothy Wordsworth.
By far the greatest scourge for adults and children alike was toothache. Modern dentistry was far in the future and most people suffered torture as their teeth decayed. The only solution was to have the tooth pulled, without anaesthetic, by the feared 'tooth drawer'. By the time she was thirty Dorothy Wordsworth had lost most of her teeth and paid large sums of money to have the remaining stumps drawn. Sarah Coleridge and her sisters had rather stronger enamel - perhaps as a result of having been brought up in a hard -water area — but even so by the time Sarah was forty-five her irrepressible smile had a number of gaps in it.
Sara Hutchinson was reduced to only one good tooth, which she wrenched eating a pear, and had to masticate her food on the roof of her mouth with her tongue. She debated for quite a while on the pros and cons of false teeth made from porcelain. 'There is nothing of disgust can attach to them as there does to the human teeth when set in bone - the very sight makes your flesh creep - which was one of the reasons of my reluctance to have anything to do with them ... the price is awful, two G[uinea]'s!! But they will last longer than I shall . . .'3 Apparently Dorothy had already had three sets. Some did not fit and Sara feared that she would be unable to wear them, but thought it worth the risk.
What is striking about the group is the amount of mental illness suffered by the women. Of them all, only Sarah Coleridge, Mary Wordsworth and her sister Sara Hutchinson were largely free of it, though they too were ill with nervous exhaustion or what we would now refer to as 'stress' at certain times of their lives.
Depression and 'hysteria' were a prominent feature of nineteenth-century women's lives, a phenomenon lucidly discussed in Elaine Showalter's book The Female Malady. Intelligent, creative, full of potential, the women of the Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey families led stifling lives within the four walls of their houses - their lives bounded by child-rearing and domestic concerns without any prospect of escape. Dorothy Wordsworth found relief in long solitary walks on the hills, but her mind finally gave way under the emotional stresses of her life, the corrosion of opium and a lack of personal fulfilment that left her feeling barren and useless.
For Edith Southey, a fearful, pessimistic disposition and a miserable marriage made her depressed and the victim of eating disorders. Her grief at losing four of her children finally eroded the last shreds of her sanity. She became increasingly hostile towards her sisters, her husband and even her remaining children. She was often violent towards them and had to be restrained. When Edith was taken to the Quaker Retreat at York, she showed no desire to go back home at all.
Mary Lovell - possessed of a fine intellect grounded in the classics and a lively, extrovert disposition that had taken her on to the Bristol stage - was literally bored out of her mind in the back room at Greta Hall. The knowledge that the future held nothing for her except more of the same kept her prostrated on the sofa with only hartshorn and lavender water for alleviation.
This blight affected the younger generation too. The beautiful, wilful Dora Wordsworth, whose literary and artistic talents are apparent in her journals, letters and drawings, remained dutifully silent for most of her life. She formed romantic attachments with both men and women, the most intense and significant being with the novelist Maria Jane Jewsbury. After Jane died she married a lifelong friend, Edward Quillinan - a poet thirteen years her senior - against her father's wishes. William disliked losing what Coleridge called 'his petticoats'. Despite further family opposition, Dora travelled to Portugal with Quillinan and on her return published an account of her experiences which violated yet another family taboo. Dora died at home the following year, an emaciated skeleton whose tubercular bones protruded through her pressure sores. She withstood the agony with the stoicism that had kept her smiling through all her earlier discouragements and disappointments.
Dora's best friend, Edith May Southey, escaped the family net into a fashionable marriage, bearing the burden of guilt that her departure had precipitated the final crumbling of her mother's mind. Edith May's cousin, Sara Coleridge, determined not to be caught in the same trap, found herself in the double bind of a woman trying to lead two lives. The roles of wife and mother did not fit neatly with those of scholar and author. In the conflict between the demands of her body and those of her mind, both were almost wrecked. As Adrienne Rich put it, 'trying to fulfil traditional female functions in a traditional way is in direct conflict with the subversive function of the imagination'.4 In order to conform to society's notions of what women were supposed to be, much of a woman's real personality - particularly her longings and expectations - was suppressed.
The Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey women were very familiar with this subversive female 'other' - a truculent, disobedient, independently minded, creative, sexual being, whose face rose towards them every time they looked in the mirror. It was a vision perfectly evoked by Sara Coleridge's second cousin Mary Coleridge.
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I sat before my glass one day,
And conjured up a vision bare,
Unlike the aspects glad and gay,
That erst were found reflected there -
The vision of a woman wild
With more than womanly despair . . .
Her lips were open - not a sound
Came through the parted lines of red.
Whatever it was, the hideous wound
In silence and in secret bled.
No sigh relieved her speechless woe,
She had no voice to speak her dread . . .
Shade of a shadow in the glass,
O set the crystal surface free! Pass
as the fairer visions pass
Nor ever more return, to be
The ghost of a distracted hour,
That heard me whisper, 'I am she!'5
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Writing a group biography has the advantage of allowing a multi-faceted view of each individual, seen from a number of different perspectives. As the young Sara Coleridge wrote, 'Poor is the portrait that one look pourtrays/It mocks the face on which we loved to gaze'.6 But it also poses a number of technical problems and, with so many people in focus at the same time, the duplication of names can be very confusing to the reader. There are three Saras, two Dorothys, two Marys and two Ediths. In order to simplify, I have adopted the practice of distinguishing one Sara from another by keeping the 'h' for Sarah Coleridge and dropping it for her daughter Sara and - as Coleridge wished - for Sara Hutchinson (his beloved Asra). Sarah's sister Mary Lovell is usually referred to by first and second names to distinguish her from Mary Hutchinson (subsequently Wordsworth). Edith Southey is referred to as Edith and her daughter as Edith May, which was the usual practice of the family. Dorothy Wordsworth shared the same name as her niece, who was usually known to family and friends as Dora.
It was usual at this date for men to refer to their peers by their surnames only - their wives and female relatives would also do this when talking about their husbands and fathers outside the family. Christian names were only used between husband and wife, brother and sister or very close friends. Mary would talk about William within the family but to others he would be 'Wordsworth' or 'Mr Wordsworth'. Coleridge preferred to be known by his surname or his initials STC (Esteesi), even by his family circle, since he hated his Christian name. This practice has, where practicable, been followed in the book.
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PART ONE: BROTHERS AND SISTERS
Three Milliners from Bath
If the Fricker sisters' life story was a fairy-tale their extraordinary history would begin something like this: 'Once upon a time there were three sisters, all rich, beautiful and clever . . .' Sarah, Edith and Mary were destined to marry three friends - three of the most brilliant and creative men of their generation - and spend not only their childhood, but most of their adult lives under the same roof. Obedient to the ancient traditions of folk-tale construction, their story contains conflicts and rivalries and great reverses of fortune.
It begins in Bristol and Bath. During the period of the Regency, until the death of George III in 1820, Bath was at its zenith as a fashionable resort for those exhausted by the dissipation of the London Season, or bored witless by the dullness of life on their country estates. In strict contrast, 9 miles away in Bristol, there was a thriving, independently minded, progressive merchant-venturer community. For the middle classes, to which the Fricker family belonged, the two cities together provided not only a good living from service industries, but a unique opportunity to visit the Pump Rooms and assemblies and mingle with the aristocracy. This was the lively, prosperous and upwardly mobile context in which Sarah Fricker and her sisters grew up.
The Frickers were typical of many middle-class families leaving behind their rural yeoman roots for a life in the city, money earned from trade rather than the soil, and the opportunity to enjoy more fashionable and cultured pursuits. The girls' grandfather had been a farmer and maltster in Somerset. Their father Stephen, a younger son, decided to move to Bristol to set up as a wine and spirit merchant, though his personal input into the business was somewhat reluctant, since he thought himself 'too much of a gentleman for business'. Mrs Fricker was the daughter of a radical, merchant-venturer family who owned a large iron foundry. She had been well educated at a girls' boarding school, brought her own money into the marriage and reared her daughters in an aura of claustrophobic gentility.
Their childhood was divided between a smart house in Bath and a villa at Westbury, just outside Bristol, which had its own kitchen garden and dairies. There was a series of failed businesses. At one time or another Stephen Fricker's holdings included a tavern, a pottery, a coal yard and a liquor vault. But his own reluctance to involve himself in the business, extravagant living standards and general incompetence with money meant that he got through his own and his wife's money very quickly. The girls' childhood was punctuated by financial crises, usually resolved by an application to relatives for financial assistance.
Sarah was the eldest child in the family, born on 10 September 1770. Her sister Mary followed in 1771, Edith in 1774 and then three younger children - Martha, Elizabeth and George. Four other children died in infancy. The three older girls were all very different in appearance and temperament. Sarah was friendly, outgoing, quick-tempered, impulsive and had a natural sensuality. Mary was apparently the liveliest and most academic of the three, while Edith, the most elegant, was prone to depression, self-effacing to a fault and fearful of anything new or strange.
Bristol was the home of Hannah More, a great advocate of female education, and the girls were all educated rather above the normal standards of the day - probably at the school run by Hannah More. Sarah read widely in both English and French and was particularly proficient in maths. Mary learned Latin and Greek. They were also progressive in their outlook, brought up in liberal, Unitarian surroundings - the girls apparently read Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman almost as soon as it was published in 1792. For Sarah its ideals of sexual equality accorded with her own passionate nature. She had no intention of being 'the toy of man, his rattle', willing to 'jingle in his ears whenever ... he chooses to be amused'. The idea of being a loving friend to your husband rather than a 'humble dependent' was very attractive, and what Wollstonecraft wrote about female independence and self-reliance had become so evidently necessary by the time Sarah read the book, it seemed a fundamental truth.
In 1786 Stephen Fricker's financial difficulties reached a point where they could no longer be shored up by household economies or family charity. In any case, both his own family and that of his wife had long since lost patience with Stephen's financial incompetence and were no longer willing to put their hands in their pockets. When he went bankrupt in 1786 the girls were pitched violently into a very different world. They lost houses, furniture, everything but the clothes they stood up in and, as the family of a bankrupt, their social credibility. Without a roof over their heads, the family was broken up. Sarah, just sixteen years old, went with her father to stay at a friend's house outside Bristol, her mother and the youngest children were taken in by another friend, while Edith and Mary (twelve and fourteen respectively) were lodged elsewhere. A few months later Stephen Fricker died aged forty-eight, leaving a widow and six children aged between one and sixteen without any means of support.
Mrs Fricker rented lodgings on Redcliffe Hill in Bristol, ran a small private school for a while and then a dress shop. Neither enterprise was very successful, so Sarah, Mary and Edith went out to work as needlewomen. The fashionable society in which they had been consumers suddenly became their livelihood. It was obligatory for the wealthy women who frequented Bristol and Bath to be dressed in the latest kick of fashion, so dressmaking and millinery trades flourished, and Bath modistes were noted for their skills, being second only to London. The Fricker girls, trained in female accomplishments, were all skilled needlewomen and had no difficulty earning their livings from their needles. But it was a profession with a dubious reputation. It was Byron who made the sarcastic remark about Coleridge and Southey marrying 'two milliners from Bath', gossip repeated by Thomas De Quincey, who added, 'Everybody knows what is meant to be conveyed in that expression.'1
This fragmentation of a close family unit, the sudden loss of social standing and of prospects, and the inevitable isolation affected the girls deeply. The shame and the disgrace of it stayed with Sarah all her life but she was by nature a fighter, determined to come through it all successfully. To the end of her life she persisted in using a particular motto to seal her letters with the optimistic words ' Toujours gaiP printed on it. Her sister Edith, already inclined to gloom, always expecting the worst, became paranoid about money - convinced even when she was comfortably off that she was on the brink of ruin. For Mary it created a sense of helplessness - that whatever she did, she was powerless to alter her ultimate fate.
Many of the people who gave the girls work were old friends of the family and one of the people Sarah went out to sew for was Mrs Margaret Southey, mother of Robert. The Southey and Fricker families had known each other since the children were small and went to dame school together. Their circumstances were very similar, Mr Southey senior having come up from the country, where his parents were woollen manufacturers, to go into business in Bristol as a linen draper. Like Stephen Fricker, he paid others to manage the business for him while he adopted a style of living inappropriate to his income and expectations. He married the daughter of a Bristol tradesman, whose half-sister, Miss Elizabeth Tyler, led a fashionable life in Bath.
Robert Southey, the eldest son, was born in 1774, 'a great red creature covered in rolls of fat' and initially rejected by his mother, who thought she would never be able to love such an ugly creature. Thereafter he lived mainly with his aunt in Bath. She was beautiful, but possessed of a violent temper and used to having her own way. She also had a private income left to her by an uncle and aspired to climb the social ladder. Rich and wilful; 'Tyrannical and Indulgent'; clever and spendthrift - her personality was a litany of antitheses.
She insisted that Robert should sleep in her bed. As she didn't get up until about eleven - quite a reasonable hour for a fashionable lady - and he was awake by six, he was forced to lie unnaturally still and quiet for several hours. She had an obsession about dirt and dust so he was not allowed to play in the garden in case he tore or dirtied his clothes. If someone she classed as 'unclean' came into the house the cup and saucer they used had to be buried in the garden for six weeks before they could be used again. Her portrait, painted by Gainsborough, was covered by a curtain to keep it free from dust and flies. She also had a phobia about marriage, and her servants were turned out if they married. But she did take Southey to the theatre to see Mrs Siddons and introduced him to literature through the Bath circulating library. This lonely, rather boring childhood schooled Southey in self-control, self-reliance, concealment of real feeling and a dedication to duty.
Not surprisingly Southey had little affection for Miss Tyler and became rebellious. This wore her patience thin, as the adorable precocious baby became a boy. On one occasion, when Southey's father came to see him, he 'found me pale and thin. I had just recovered from a fever and have not yet forgotten the tea-cup in which the bark was given me, and a foul sweet medicine. He returned home in a rage - swore my Aunt would kill "the boy" and in consequence I was transported to Bristol.' Starved of love, Southey was overjoyed to be at home again with his nursemaid Pat: 'I loved her dearly, she had neither temperance soberness or chastity - but she was fond of me.' He was sent to school to a Mrs Powell, which he hated so much that at six he was taken away, and very soon he was back in Bath living with his aunt again.2 Even after he was sent to boarding school he found that he was expected to spend the holidays with his aunt, in Bath, Bristol and the various fashionable watering-places she frequented.
Sarah Fricker, four years older, first saw him as 'a little boy in frocks'. Miss Tyler used to dress him up in 'A fantastic costume of nankeen . . . trimmed with green fringe; a vest and tunic outfit known as a jam' (ancestor of the pyjama!).3 According to Sarah, the Fricker girls thought Miss Tyler 'elegant, handsome and fashionable', a social example whose dress and manners could be emulated, but 'very haughty'.4 She was an egotistical snob, but she took the Fricker girls under her wing, employing Edith and finding work for the others among her wealthy friends. She used her connections to find a place for Mary, who had a beautiful singing voice, in the theatre. So Mary became an actress - a profession with as many immodest associations as millinery.
Sarah Fricker and Robert Southey were very good friends, despite Sarah's four-year seniority. When Robert's father also went bankrupt in 1792 and died a few months later, probably from consumption, they found themselves in almost identical circumstances. Southey found the humiliation of having to apply to his father's wealthy relatives and expose himself to rejection almost too much to bear. He also felt keenly the responsibility of his position as the head of the family with two younger brothers and a sister to provide for. Sarah Fricker, having been through the same experience, provided a sympathetic ear for Southey's difficulties.
He had recently been expelled from Westminster school for writing a provocative article on flogging in a radical news-sheet. Southey had been deeply affected by the French Revolution, writing later: 'Few persons but those who have lived in it can conceive or comprehend what the memory of the French Revolution was, nor what a visionary world seemed to open upon those who were just entering it. Old things seemed passing away, and nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the human race.'5 Southey recalled that he 'left Westminster in a perilous state - a heart full of poetry and feeling, a head full of Rousseau and Werther, and my religious principles shaken by Gibbon.' He had also discovered Epictetus. 'I carried Epictetus in my pocket till my very heart was ingrained with it. . . And the longer I live, and the more I learn, the more am I convinced that Stoicism, properly understood, is the best and noblest of systems.'6
Sarah was also one of the few people with whom Southey could discuss his radical ideas, and when he went up to Balliol College, Oxford in 1792, funded by his maternal uncle, he corresponded with her. For two young single people to write to each other at this date was usually evidence of a close attachment, either an engagement or a blood relationship. Their close friendship lasted for the rest of their lives, but it may well have begun as a romantic attachment. One of Southey's letters, written before his involvement with Edith, mentions an occasion when 'In the evening I walked round Bath in hopes of meeting one whom I earnestly wished to see - my hopes were raised to the highest pitch when I thought I recognised the dress, but disappointment soon checked them and the rest of the evening passed heavily and sadly.'7 Miss Tyler was worried enough to forbid Robert to have anything to do with the Fricker girls, whom she considered his social inferiors. If he married at all, she wanted him to make a 'good match' to restore the family fortunes and was presumably confident that with her money and connections it could be achieved. But Southey resisted her attempts at matchmaking. 'The only society that could please me here is that of some young women, sisters, with whom I was partly educated and whose histories are as melancholy as my own. The ill-grounded fears of my Aunt forbid it. I see them seldom, but they know my motives and pity me. Other society I have none. This city is peopled with rich fools . . .'8
Miss Tyler's disapproval of the Fricker girls was problematic since it was Miss Tyler's fortune that was helping to support both the Southey and the Fricker families. Not only was she using her connections to find employment for the girls, she had also lent Mrs Southey money to purchase a lease on a house in Bath in order to rent out rooms. Mrs Southey was ill with consumption and hardly in a position to help herself.
Southey was an attractive, willowy figure, described by De Quincey as being 'somewhat taller than Wordsworth, being about five feet eleven in height, or a trifle more'; his slender limbs made him seem taller than he was. He had a quiet air of elegance, though he did not dress in a particularly fashionable manner, wearing a short jacket and pantaloons which gave him the appearance 'of a Tyrolese mountaineer'. He had black, curly hair, but a very fair complexion, a strong, aquiline nose and large hazel eyes. Most people commented, like De Quificey, on the air of 'reserve and distance' which he had, the product of a shy and intensely private disposition in which all passionate emotion must be publicly suppressed. He was also very fastidious in sexual matters, stating emphatically: 'Nothing is more astonishing to me than that a virtue so rigidly demanded from women should be so despised among men.'9 He remained a virgin until his marriage.
Southey was rapidly becoming a republican, embracing opposition to the established Church as part of his radical stance. He was not exactly an atheist - he always acknowledged the existence of some Deity, describing himself sometimes as a 'Deist'. This was extremely awkward because his uncle, the Rev. William Hill, was paying for his education at Oxford on the understanding that Southey would go into the Church. Southey was torn between his duty and principles. Writing to a friend, he declared that he would exchange every intellectual gift he had been blessed with if he could only have implicit faith in order to please his uncle and provide support for his mother and his siblings. But, he went on, 'My principles and practice are . . . democratic . . . the very existence of a priest is wrong. To obtain future support - to return the benefits I have received - I must become contemptible . . . and perjured.'10 Southey - like Dorothy Wordsworth, educated to please - found it difficult to kick over the traces. The atmosphere of Balliol horrified him. He found himself with young men 'who were sent to Oxford in order that they might proceed through their course of shooting, horse-racing, whoring, and drinking, out of sight of their families and without injury to their characters.'11
Mary Fricker, through her work in the theatre, had met Robert Lovell, the twenty-two-year-old son of a wealthy Bristol Quaker. He led the life of a wealthy gentleman's son; like many young bucks of the day, he was interested in pugilism and blood sports and, on the face of it, had little in common with Southey. But he had similar democratic sympathies and poetic ambitions and when the Fricker sisters introduced the two men, they were instantly attracted to each other and became great friends. Four years older than Southey, Lovell too had been to Balliol, where a brilliant career had been predicted. His relationship with Mary met with considerable disapproval. She had no money, she was an actress, and she was not a Quaker: she was thus totally ineligible. Lovell, a 'birthright' Quaker who was expected to marry within the faith, was warned that his family would disinherit him if he married Mary Fricker.
Southey was still spending his time, when not up at Balliol, staying with Miss Tyler. This meant that he saw a great deal of Edith Fricker, now working for his aunt. Edith was a very shy girl, who took a great deal of getting to know, but her modest and retiring disposition was very attractive to Southey, himself a man of much reserve. He began to walk her home every evening when she finished work. It surprised most people (including Sarah) that Southey preferred Edith to her older sister, but perhaps Sarah was too much like Miss Tyler with her strong personality - outgoing, energetic, clever, quick-tempered - for Southey to choose her as a wife. There was also the four-year age gap.
The significant moment came in May 1794, 'playing with the lilacs' on a visit to the Old Market in Bristol. He wrote to his friend Grosvenor Bedford that Edith was 'my own age. Her face expresses the mildness of her disposition - and if her calm affection cannot render me happy I deserve to be wretched. She is mild and affectionate . . .'12 To Sarah Fricker he wrote that Edith was like 'the lily of the valley lovely in humility but like that delicate and lowly flower she would bend before the storm of pride. If error can be amiable the error of too much humility is so. I wish Edith would think more highly of herself. Tis the only fault I have discovered in her, and that is almost a virtue!'13
1794 was a momentous year for the Fricker girls. On 20 January Mary married Robert Lovell, whose family promptly threw him out and withdrew their financial support. Edith became involved with Robert Southey, and in August, Samuel Taylor Coleridge walked into the dining-room of the Lovells' lodgings in College Street in the middle of a lively family party.
Predictably most of those present fell under the spell of Coleridge's charismatic charm and irresistible enthusiasm. Sarah Fricker did not at first succumb. She looked at him objectively and recorded that he was 'brown as a berry . . . Plain, but eloquent and clever. His clothes were worn out; his hair wanted cutting. He was a dreadful figure.' He also had chronic sinus problems that meant he had to breathe through his mouth. Sarah couldn't help comparing him to Southey across the table, 'very neat, gay and smart'.14 But her objectivity quickly failed to withstand the onslaught of Coleridge's devastating charm. She was also moved by the verbal portrait he drew of his childhood, conjuring images of a cold and unsympathetic family. Isolation and alienation were things that Sarah had herself experienced and she could empathise with his feelings; his 'lost child' act also appealed to her strong maternal instincts; and above all his sensuality and sheer joy at being alive brought out both those answering qualities in Sarah.
Coleridge told a very carefully edited and well-dramatised life story to the Frickers and Southeys. He always told romanticised apocryphal stories of his ancestry, sometimes a bastard grandfather, brought up on the parish, sometimes 'a weaver, half poet and half madman'. In fact, his father had been vicar at Ottery St Mary and also headmaster of King's Grammar School. An erudite man of many interests, he had published a variety of works, including religious studies and a Latin grammar, contributed to the Gentleman s Magazine and translated a play from the Latin entitled The Fair Barbarian.
Coleridge had been born in the vicarage of Ottery St Mary in Devon on 21 October 1772, the youngest of a family of ten (eight brothers and one sister as well as three older half-sisters). At the time of his birth his father was fifty-three, his mother forty-five. He was very spoilt, by his own admission, which he said made him miserable, because it made his siblings jealous. He hated his name, shortened in the family to Sam - he had been named for his godfather, a local gentleman - and preferred to be known by his initials, STC.
Like many creative artists, Coleridge professed to a sense of isolation and difference from an early age. William Wordsworth believed that he had had a revelation marking him out as a 'chosen son' and Coleridge had a similar sense of vocation. The older boys were all settled in traditional military, ecclesiastical or scholastic careers and were all high achievers in their fields. When John Coleridge died, Samuel was nine years old, but there was already a pressure to succeed in the conventional sense, as well as an implicit expectation of conformity.
Coleridge was precocious and from the first displayed a voracious appetite for books. He later characterised himself as 'a library cormorant'. There was a lot of rivalry at home. His brothers punished him for being their mother's favourite. As for his mother, after doting on him as a small child, she gradually found him more difficult and less appealing, and eventually a disappointment. Coleridge felt rejected by her. He became withdrawn and isolated and retreated into the world of books and the imagination. This rejection had a profound effect on Coleridge's adult relationships with women. He was always looking for absolute, unconditional love and commitment and, when he didn't get it, felt rejected and betrayed.
Amongst his siblings he was always closest to George, eight years his senior, whom he regarded as a second father. The rivalry was greatest with his brother Frank, the next youngest, and it was after being teased beyond endurance by him in 1779 that Samuel attacked him with a knife and then ran away, not being found until dawn on a cold, stormy October night. It was the first of many spectacular demands for attention, the first of many instances of running away from difficult situations he had caused himself.
Coleridge went to dame school until he was six and was allowed to read anything he could lay his hands on. The result was that he 'became a dreamer - and acquired an indisposition to all bodily activity - and I was fretful, and inordinately passionate, and as I could not play at any thing, and was slothful, I was despised & hated by the boys; and because I could read & spell & had, I may truly say, a memory & understanding forced into almost an unnatural ripeness, I was flattered & wondered at by all the old women.'15
His father then sent him to the King's School where he did exceptionally well, revealing a precocious intelligence. His father died in 1781 and Coleridge was sent as a charity boy to Christ's Hospital school, which had been founded for the children of poor clergy. He was sent off to his mother's brother John Bowden, an underwriter's clerk who also kept a tobacconist's, in London, where he also spent his school holidays. He rarely saw his mother again.
It is something more than coincidence that all the major players in this drama were orphans; the Wordsworths, the Hutchinson sisters, Robert Southey, Coleridge and the Fricker girls. All had not only lost one or both parents while still young, but had experienced a loss of social status and financial hardship as a result. All of them suffered the burdens of charity, and of being in a state of dependence. This shared experience was one of the things that bound them together as they sought - in their friendships - to recreate the loving, secure family relationships they had lost.
One of Coleridge's contemporaries at school was Charles Lamb, who became a lifelong friend. The atmosphere was one of humiliation - never being allowed to forget their charitable status - as well as the usual brutality, the physical and sexual abuse of boys' boarding schools. Coleridge was flogged for day-dreaming and carelessness. And there were many floggings - the headmaster was a famous sadist. Coleridge escaped on to the roof and lay on the tiles looking at the sky, dreaming of other landscapes, 'for, cloister'd in a city School/The Sky was all I knew of Beautiful'.16 His experiences there as a child gave him nightmares as an adult.
He first began writing poetry at school, and in January 1791 won an exhibition to Jesus College, Cambridge. Much was expected of him. But he was already taking opium for the pains of rheumatic fever, spending much of the winter in the school sanatorium. And then came a series of family tragedies. In 1791 his sister Nancy died from consumption and his brother Luke (who had qualified as a doctor and was practising in Devon) died from fever; in 1792 his brother Frank shot himself out in India in a delirious fit.
In the autumn of 1791 Coleridge went up to Cambridge, and while he was there he renewed his friendship with the Evans family - a mother and three daughters, Anne, Eliza and Mary - who had befriended him when he was at school with their brother. They became his surrogate family and he fell in love with Mary, a relationship which ended when she became involved with someone else. In his first year at Cambridge he won the Brown Gold Medal with a Greek sapphic 'Ode on the Slave Trade' - quite an achievement for a first-year student and George was delighted. Coleridge went home to visit his family and found it a very alien environment: he felt like a stranger. His mother treated him like a child and he was even forbidden to drink wine at table.
In his second year he continued to do extremely well, but probably set his sights too high; he was second in the Brown Medal and failed narrowly to get the Craven Scholarship. Coming second was not good enough for Coleridge and it intensified his sense of failure. He began running up enormous debts in the pursuit of what he called 'unchastities'. He went home and confessed to his family that he owed almost £150. After enduring their strictures he was given the money to pay the debts, most of which unfortunately was spent in much the same way. Unable to extricate himself froin the predicament, he buried himself recklessly in a delirium of drink and pleasure. He disappeared for two months and reappeared on 2 December 1793 when he volunteered as a private in the 15th Light Dragoons, giving his name as Silas Tomkyn Comber bache.
When finally tracked down by George, he indulged in a melodramatic display of self-recrimination - probably genuine. 'I have been a fool even to madness . . . My mind is illegible to myself - I am lost in the labyrinth, the trackless wilderness of my own bosom . . . The shame and sorrow of those who loved me . . . They haunt my sleep - they enfever my Dreams!'17 George finally managed to have him discharged as insane on 10 April 1794 for the payment of 25 guineas.
Initially gated by the college, as soon as his punishment was over he left on a walking tour, heading for the West Country and Wales accompanied by a friend. They left Cambridge on 15 June, intending to visit another friend from schooldays who was at Oxford. There on 17 June they met Robert Southey, already famous for his republicanism. He was in the process of writing an epic poem on Joan of Arc. Always prolific, he apparently burned 10,000 lines of it before publication.
Both Southey and Coleridge were disillusioned by university life, unsuited to traditional careers by virtue of their beliefs, and perplexed by the problem of maintaining themselves. From their 'metaphysical' and philosophical discussions, Pantisocracy was born. The word was created by Coleridge from the Greek pan-socratia which means an all-governing society. At its heart was the notion of a community of self-governing equals. There was to be no private ownership of land, which was regarded as a common heritage belonging to everyone. Man and nature would live in harmony. Even animals were to be sisters and brothers 'in the Fraternity of universal Nature'. Children had to be removed from the corruptions and prejudices of modern society and brought up as 'children of Nature'. It was to be a totally democratic society, in harmony with nature; a new beginning. Coleridge wrote: 'The Leading Idea of Pantisocracy is to make men necessarily virtuous by removing all Motives to Evil - all possible Temptations ... It is each Individual's duty to be Just, because it is in his Interest. . . The Heart should have fed upon the truth, as Insects on a Leaf-till it be tinged with the colour, and show its food in every the minutest fibre.'18
Southey was fascinated by Coleridge, writing to a friend that he was 'of the most uncommon merit, - of the strongest genius, the clearest judgment, the best heart. My friend he already is, and must hereafter be yours. It is, I fear, impossible to keep him till you come, but my efforts shall not be wanting.'19 Coleridge was similarly impressed, referring to Southey as 'a nightingale among owls . . . truly a man of perpendicular virtu a downright, upright Republican. He was also much impressed with Southey's virginity. Richard Holmes, in his biography of Coleridge, points to a certain element of sexual attraction between the two men, though both were heterosexual. Southey had a little of the dandy in him -he had once minced through Bristol dressed as a woman - and was, physically, the exact opposite of Coleridge. Southey was very fastidious, unlike his sensual companion, confessing distaste when he was forced to share a bed with Coleridge on a walking tour, something that perhaps had its origins in childhood memories of sharing a bed with Miss Tyler.
After his expedition to Wales, Coleridge arrived in Bristol on 5 August and presented himself at the Lovells' in order to renew his acquaintance with Southey and Robert Lovell. When he was introduced to the Fricker sisters, he was newly on the rebound from Mary Evans. He had seen her in the street as he passed through Wrexham a few days earlier and been so shaken by the encounter it made him physically ill. He admitted to Southey that 'her Image is in the Sanctuary of my Heart, and never can it be torn away'.21
Despite Sarah Fricker's initial reserve towards Coleridge, there was a strong sexual attraction between the two almost from the beginning. Sarah's ample figure, lustrous brown hair and 'speaking' eyes, full of fun, made an instant impression. Coleridge, despite his dishevelled appearance and long, unruly hair, was very attractive to women, perhaps because he gave the impression of being 'a very gentle bear'. His conversation, his intellectual accomplishments and extravagant manner dazzled most people who met him. Like a benevolent necromancer he cast a spell which soon bound the more pragmatic Sarah in its web.
The talk around the dinner table was all of Pantisocracy, the girls already being well grounded in democratic principles by Lovell and Southey. Any reservations they may have had about the scheme were erased by Coleridge's persuasive tongue. He talked, it was said, 'above singing'. Curiously, Pantisocracy seems to have been from the beginning more of a flight of fancy to Coleridge than a practical reality. Southey really believed that it could be achieved; Coleridge believed in the ideal and the principle with all the passion of his turbulent nature, but it was only a dream -what his publisher Cottle called 'an epidemic delusion'. To Southey it was a passionately longed-for reality, an escape from the dilemmas that faced him. 'I look forward with impatience to the moment when I shall ascend the bark, and gaze on the lessening shore till it be for ever lost in distance. Like Adam I may "drop some natural tears - but dry them soon" . . . When Coleridge and I are sawing down a tree we shall discuss metaphysics; criticise poetry when hunting a buffalo, and write sonnets whilst following the plough. Our society will be of the most polished order . . . Our females are beautiful amiable and accomplished . . .'22
Pantisocracy was based on the philosophies of David Hartley and Spinoza, and the men were heavily influenced by the writings of Dr Joseph Priestley and William Godwin. The plan was that a community of twelve men and twelve women would emigrate to America - possibly Kentucky. A lot of time was spent drawing up the principles their community would be based on and the rules that would regulate it. According to a friend, 'The regulations relating to the females strike them as the most difficult. . Their intentions were admirable and worthy of any twentieth-century New Man, but the sheer unreality of their idea of domestic democracy is revealed by one of Coleridge's letters: 'Let the married Women do only what is absolutely convenient and customary for pregnant Women or nurses. - Let the Husbands do all the Rest - and what will that all be -? Washing with a Machine and cleaning the House. One Hour's addition to our daily Labor - and Pantisocracy in its most perfect Sense is practicable.' He added airily that the women's labours would be similarly light since 'An Infant is almost always sleeping - and during its slumbers the Mother may in the same Room perform the little offices of ironing Cloaths or making Shirts.'23 The women, who might have been able to draw up a more realistic timetable, were never consulted. There were also unresolved difficulties about the whole question of marriage, and whether an unhappy union should be dissolved if both parties wished it.
Lovell introduced Southey and Coleridge to Joseph Cottle, the Bristol bookseller and publisher, and they discovered in him a willing patron who was as 'inexperienced and ardent' as themselves. Cottle remembered Southey as 'tall, dignified, possessing great suavity of manners; an eye piercing, with a countenance full of genius, kindliness, and intelligence, I gave him at once the right hand of fellowship, and to the moment of his decease, that cordiality was never withdrawn.'24 His relationship with Coleridge was more turbulent but Cottle's friendship was vitally important to the group.
Coleridge and Southey went off to Somerset to visit Thomas Poole, a new acquaintance who was a radical sympathiser, returning at the end of August. They stayed with Mrs Southey in Bath and Coleridge discovered that she had invited Sarah Fricker to stay with her. In the few days before he went back to Cambridge, he converted them all to Pantisocracy. Even Mrs Southey felt inclined to join the emigration scheme. Miss Tyler's manservant Shadrach Weeks was also very keen to go. Miss Tyler was as yet totally ignorant of the project, Southey having not had the courage to tell her.