would say to me – ‘I will be your sister – your favourite Sister in the Family of Soul.’10
A month later, Coleridge was thrown into deeper confusion by the arrival of an unsigned letter in a familiar hand: ‘Is this handwriting altogether erased from your Memory? To whom am I addressing myself? For whom am I now violating the Rules of female Delicacy? Is it for the same Coleridge, whom I once regarded as a Sister her best-beloved Brother?’ The writer urged him to abandon his ‘absurd and extravagant’ plan to leave England. ‘I cannot easily forget those whom I once loved,’ she wrote teasingly, and finished: ‘Farewell – Coleridge – ! I shall always feel that I have been your Sister.’ The writer, of course, was Mary Evans. She may have written at the request of George Coleridge, who was deeply distressed at the possibility that his youngest brother might emigrate. George had also written to him direct – a letter of ‘remonstrance, and Anguish, & suggestions, that I am deranged!!’
Coleridge copied out Mary’s letter for Southey:
I loved her, Southey! almost to madness … I endeavoured to be perpetually with Miss Brunton – I even hoped, that her Exquisite Beauty and uncommon Accomplishments might have cured one passion by another. The latter I could easily have dissipated in her absence – and so have restored my affections to her, whom I do not love – but whom by every tie of Reason and Honour I ought to love. I am resolved – but wretched!
He was now in even more of a muddle. ‘My thoughts are floating about in a most Chaotic State,’ he confessed. ‘What would I not give for a Day’s conversation with you? So much, that I seriously think of Mail coaching it to Bath – altho’ but for a Day.’11
His excitable state of mind is evident in a letter he wrote around this time to Francis Wrangham, formerly of Cambridge, now a Cobham curate, in which he sneered at the stock formula of sending ‘compliments’.*
Compliments! Cold aristocratic Inanities – ! I abjure their nothingness. If there be any whom I deem worthy of remembrance – I am their Brother. I call even my Cat Sister in the Fraternity of universal Nature. Owls I respect & Jack Asses I love: for Aldermen & Hogs, Bishops & Royston Crows I have not particular partiality –; they are my Cousins however, at least by Courtesy. But Kings, Wolves, Tygers, Generals, Ministers, and Hyaenas, I renounce them all – or if they must be my kinsmen, it shall be in the 50th Remove –
He ended this letter with the exhortation: ‘May the Almighty Panti-socratizer of Souls pantisocratize the Earth.’13 A little later, he addressed a poem ‘To a Young Ass’, which opened with the line ‘Poor Little Foal of an oppressed Race’:
Innocent Foal! Thou poor despis’d Forlorn! –
I hail thee Brother, spite of Fool’s Scorn!
And fain I’d take thee with me in the Dell
Of high-soul’d Pantisocracy to dwell;
Coleridge was much mocked for this poem after it was published.
He could not stop thinking about Mary Evans. ‘She WAS VERY lovely, Southey!’ He wrote a poem about her, ‘On a Discovery Made Too Late’. Finally, he screwed up the courage to write to her: ‘Too long has my Heart been the torture house of Suspense.’ He had heard a rumour that she was engaged to be married to another man. Was it true? In asking this, he had no other design or expectation, he said, ‘than that of arming my fortitude by total hopelessness’. He saw that she regarded him ‘merely with the kindness of a Sister’. For four years, he wrote, ‘I have endeavoured to smother a very ardent attachment … Happy were I, had it been with no more than a Brother’s ardor!’14
He received another letter from George, now suggesting that he should leave Cambridge and study law in the Temple – and in reply, assured his brother that the views he had put into the mouths of his characters in The Fall of Robespierre were not his own. ‘Solemnly, my Brother! I tell you – I am not a Democrat.’15 (Thomas Poole had described Coleridge as ‘in politicks a Democrat, to the utmost extent of the word’.16)
Early in November Coleridge travelled up to London with his friend Potter, an undergraduate at Emmanuel, a fellow poet, and liberal in politics despite having £6,000 a year and his own phaeton. The cases against the twelve prominent radicals charged with treason had come to trial,* and Coleridge wanted to be on the spot. (He may have attended the trials themselves in the public gallery.) Robert Lovell was in town too; he visited one of the defendants, Godwin’s close friend Thomas Holcroft, in Newgate prison, and attempted to convert him to Pantisocracy. He believed (mistakenly) that he had succeeded, and reported back to Southey that ‘Gerrald,† Holcroft and Godwin – the three first men in England, perhaps in the world – highly approve our plan’.17 Superbly represented in court by the brilliant advocate Thomas Erskine (who had defended Paine when he was tried in absentia in 1792), the accused had also been powerfully defended in print by Godwin, whose pamphlet Cursory Strictures on the Charge delivered by Lord Chief Justice Eyre to the Grand Jury dissected the treason charges, leaving them in tatters. (Coleridge may well have read Godwin’s Strictures, which were reproduced in the Morning Chronicle.) Though the government had raided the homes of the radicals and seized their papers, the searches had failed to turn up incriminating evidence of a conspiracy. The Attorney-General, Sir John Scott (later Lord Eldon), resorted to petulant tears in his attempt to persuade the jury to convict – but in vain. As one after another of the defendants was acquitted, it became clear that the government had overreached itself. Pitt himself was subpoenaed by the defence and humiliated in the witness box. After several successive acquittals, charges against the remaining prisoners were dropped.
The verdicts were a triumph for the resurgent radical cause. On their release, the radicals – among them Thomas Hardy, founder of the London Corresponding Society, the orator and writer John Thelwall, and the pamphleteer John Horne Tooke – were greeted as heroes. Coleridge celebrated with a sonnet in honour of Erskine, the first of a sequence of eleven ‘Sonnets on Eminent Characters’ published in the Morning Chronicle from 1 December onwards. Most of his subjects were prominent liberal or radical figures, such as Priestley, Godwin and Sheridan,* but he also wrote a sonnet honouring William Lisle Bowles, the poet he had admired so much as a schoolboy, and even a sonnet to Southey. One sonnet was devoted to Tadeusz Kościuszko, the Polish patriot who had led the armed resistance to the partition of his country; another, unlike the others scathingly critical, to a subject who, though unnamed, was obviously (‘foul apostate from his father’s fame’) the Prime Minister.
Coleridge had returned to Jesus after a week in the capital, but early in December he again left Cambridge for London, this time never to return. Once more he based himself at the Salutation and Cat, where, as one story has it, he attracted so many listeners that in recognition the landlord provided him with free lodging.† Here Coleridge was reunited with another former Christ’s Hospital pupil, Charles Lamb, who was to become one of his closest friends. They had known each other at school – but not intimately, since Lamb was three years younger. Indeed Lamb had hero-worshipped Coleridge, whose schoolboy eloquence was such that it could make the casual passer-by pause in the cloisters and stand entranced. Lamb was a lovable figure, gentle and delicate. A severe stutter provoked indulgent affection rather than derision from his schoolmates. Slightly built, with spindly legs and a shambling gait, the legacy of childhood polio, Lamb habitually dressed in worn black clothes, giving him the appearance of a country curate recently arrived in town. The austerity of his dress was