give me a bit of Bread and Meat’! from a Party dining on Lamb, Green Pease, & Sallad – Why?? Because it is impertinent & obtrusive! – I am a Gentleman! – and wherefore should the clamorous Voice of Woe intrude upon mine Ear!?
‘My companion is a Man of cultivated, tho’ not vigorous, understanding,’ he explained; ‘his feelings are all on the side of humanity – yet such are the unfeeling remarks, which the lingering remains of Aristocracy occasionally prompt.’ Coleridge was confident that their new system would put an end to such things. (But even so, there were limits – when, later in the tour, a horny-handed Welsh democrat shook his hand vigorously, Coleridge ‘trembled’ lest some parasite had ‘emigrated’.) In high spirits he informed Southey that he had bought ‘a little Blank Book, and a portable Ink horn – as I journey onward, I ever and anon pluck the wild Flowers of Poesy’. Thus began a lifelong habit of note-keeping.
He continued with an allegory of regicide: ‘When Serpents sting, the only Remedy is – to kill the Serpent …’ (These were dangerous ideas to express in a letter. Though Southey voiced extreme views in conversation, he was more circumspect about what he committed to paper.20) There followed an extract from a poem Coleridge was composing, entitled ‘Perspiration, A Travelling Eclogue’:
The Dust flies smothering, as on clatt’ring Wheels
Loath’d Aristocracy careers along.
Coleridge ended his lively letter, ‘Farewell, sturdy Republican!’ and begged Southey to send ‘Fraternity and civic Remembrances’ to Lovell.21
Coleridge and Hucks walked north-west, through Ross and Hereford, and then turned north, following the Welsh border. On the road they met two other undergraduates from Coleridge’s college, and ‘laughed famously’ because ‘these rival pedestrians … were vigorously pursuing their tour – in a post chaise!’ Their excuse for taking it easy thus was that one of them ‘had got clapped’. A week after leaving Hereford, Coleridge arrived at Wrexham, where he wrote to Southey again: ‘I have positively done nothing but dream of the System of no Property every step of the Way since I left you.’22
At Wrexham Church Coleridge was surprised to see Elizabeth, sister of his former girlfriend Mary Evans; he had forgotten that their grandmother lived there. Indeed, he had virtually forgotten Mary – but the chance encounter provided an opportunity for a good deal of posturing on both sides. Later, at the inn, he saw both Eliza and Mary hovering outside the window: ‘I turned sick, and all but fainted away!’ The young women passed by the window several times. ‘I neither eat, or slept yesterday,’ he wrote after he and Hucks had resumed their journey; ‘but Love is a local Anguish – I am 16 miles distant, and am not half so miserable.’ Coleridge plunged into an ecstasy of Wertherism, all the more delicious because he could expatiate to Southey:
She lives, but lives not for me: as a loving bride, perhaps – ah, sadness! – she has thrown her arms around another man’s neck. Farewell, ye deceitful dreams of a love-lorn mind; ye beloved shores, farewell; farewell, ah, beautiful Mary!*
He convinced himself that he had not pursued Mary because his prospects were so dim. ‘I never durst in a whisper avow my passion, though I knew she loved me.’23
‘For God’s sake, Southey! enter not into the church.’ Coleridge’s abhorrence of Anglicanism was grounded in belief rather than doubt. He was a devout Christian, then tending towards Unitarianism, and his conscience would not allow him to accept the compromises swallowed by many young men wanting to pursue a career in the established Church.
Coleridge and Hucks continued across north Wales to Anglesey, where they were reunited with the other two Cantabs, now back on their feet. Together they climbed some of the highest peaks in Wales, including Snowdon and Cader Idris, several of the ascents made during the midday summer heat. Coleridge, who thought nothing of walking forty miles in a single day, went so fast that Hucks found it difficult to keep up with him. Afterwards they made their way south again, parting company at Llandovery. Coleridge was headed for Bristol, and followed the Wye Valley downstream towards the sea via Tintern, taking the same route that Wordsworth had followed a year earlier, but in the opposite direction.
Arriving in Bristol, Coleridge immediately sought out Southey. He sent a message to Lovell – signing himself ‘Your fellow Citizen’ – asking where his friend was to be found. Southey happened to be dining that evening with Lovell and his new wife, the actress Mary Fricker, together with her pretty eldest sister, Sara.* These three had already heard much from Southey of Coleridge’s genius, so they were intrigued when he appeared at the dinner table, brown as a berry, his clothes in tatters and his hair wild, weary of walking but certainly not of talking. He was in high good humour, exhilarated at seeing Southey again, animated and funny. Sara laughed at his jokes and made some sharp remarks of her own. As he held forth, he noticed her sparkling dark eyes, her brown curling hair and her full, inviting figure.
There were five Fricker girls (and one boy), as Coleridge rapidly discovered, daughters of a widow who kept a dress shop in Bristol. Lovell had just married one daughter, and Southey was courting another. George Burnett had his eye on a third. Obviously it was urgent for the Pantisocrats to find themselves mates. It seemed possible that the whole Fricker family, mother and all, might be joining them on the banks of the Susquehanna. How appropriate if Coleridge were to become united with one of the two remaining daughters! For him, it was a similar set-up to the one he had enjoyed at Villiers Street. He had lost Mary Evans, and in doing so lost a family. Now, perhaps, he had found another.
Over the next few days, as they discussed and refined the Pantisocratic project, Southey introduced Coleridge to his Bristol friends and showed him around. Until recently Bristol had been England’s second city after London, though it was rapidly being overhauled by the new industrial cities of the north. It remained an important port, with a busy quayside and clusters of masts poking up above the roofline, lurching at drunken angles when the tide fell and the ships settled on the mud. Also prominent on the skyline were many church steeples, and the chimneys of glassworks belching out black smoke. The city had spread right across the floodplain of the Avon, and extended up the adjoining hills to form the smart suburbs of Clifton and Kingsdown, where gracious terraces and crescents provided commanding views. The river curved behind the hills through a gorge, with hanging woods: ‘a scene truly magnificent’, wrote Southey, ‘and wanting nothing but clearer water’.24 Bristol was a centre of glass and china manufacture, with significant numbers of literate and politically sophisticated artisans. The radical sympathies of a prosperous nonconformist community confronted the conservatism of professional men and wealthy merchants, including those who had grown rich trading in slaves.25 The issue of the war cut across this divide. Because Bristol was so dependent on commerce, it had been badly affected by mercantile failures consequent upon the war; there had been riots in the city for the past two years.
One of those whom Coleridge met in Bristol was Joseph Cottle, a young Baptist bookseller-publisher and would-be poet who kept a shop on the corner of Corn Street and High Street. Cottle had recently been thrown from a gig, an accident which left him lame for the rest of his life. Lovell had introduced Southey to Cottle, and now introduced Coleridge. Cottle immediately recognised Coleridge’s ‘intellectual character’ – exhibiting, as he did, ‘an eye, a brow, and a forehead, indicative of commanding genius’ – and subsequent meetings ‘increased the impression of respect’. The friendly manners of the Pantisocrats, Cottle wrote many years later in his Reminiscences, ‘infused into my heart a brotherly feeling, that more than identified their interests with my own’.26 He agreed to publish the joint