Coleridge- Darker Reflections

by Richard Holmes

  Initially Coleridge was impressed but somewhat quizzical, writing not to Tulk but to Cary on 6 February, “I have this morning been reading a strange publication – viz. Poems with very wild and interesting pictures, as the swathing, etched (I suppose) but it is said – printed and painted by the Author, W. Blake. He is a man of Genius – and I apprehend, a Swedenborgian – certainly, a mystic emphatically. You perhaps smile at my calling another Poet, a Mystic; but verily I am in the very mire of common-place common-sense compared with Mr Blake, apo- or rather ana-calyptic Poet, and Painter!”149

  A week later he wrote appreciatively to Tulk himself, returning Blake’s “poesies, metrical and graphic, with thanks”, and providing a detailed appreciation of the work. He thought Blake extraordinary, “a man capable of such faults + such beauties”. His faults were “despotism in symbols”; his beauties “such as only a Master in his art could produce”. Coleridge then listed the poems he had particularly liked, including “The Tiger”, “London”, “The Sick Rose”, “The Lamb” and “The Divine Image”.

  What particularly struck him was Blake’s radical understanding of child-exploitation. He marked with a double-sign of emphasis “The Little Black Boy”, with its reflection on the slave trade; and remarked on one of the earliest references in print to child prostitution, “The Little Vagabond”. Coleridge commented: “I would have had it omitted – not for the want of innocence in the poem, but from the too probable want of it in many readers.” He thought there was much to shock pious readers in Blake’s vision of childhood (though he was not shocked himself), and he imagined one of “the modern Saints (whose whole being is a Lie)” reading a poem like “The Little Vagabond” with “the whites of his Eyes upraised at the audacity of this poem!”150

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  At this point the whole subject of child-exploitation suddenly presented itself in the most urgent and practical form. On 21 February, Coleridge (while still lecturing) wrote again to Tulk “with much grief” at the news that Sir Robert Peel and his son the Irish Secretary had prematurely introduced into the Commons a Bill to regulate the labouring hours of “the poor Children in the Cotton Factories”. He felt that “without due preparation of the public mind” it would almost certainly be thrown out by the Lords. Such a rejection might set back reform for a decade, at a time when the labouring classes were ignored by Lord Liverpool’s dilatory government. “The Friends of outraged Nature” should intervene before the second or third reading of the Bill.151

  As the Bill passed its first reading in the Commons at the end of April and the crisis approached, Coleridge determined on direct intervention. With Gillman’s anxious blessing, he left Highgate and moved his base of operations to Westminster, where he could work once again like a professional journalist. He stayed with a medical friend of Green’s, the surgeon T. J. Pettigrew, who had a house next to the Spring Gardens coffee-house.152 His plan was to write a polemical pamphlet in support of the Bill, to be printed (at Tulk’s expense) and circulated directly to members of both Houses. In the event he wrote three, two of which have survived.153

  Coleridge co-opted Crabb Robinson to provide “legal information” and comb “that pithy little manual, yclept, the Statutes of Great Britain” for constitutional arguments, and an analysis of the First Factory Act, passed in 1802.154 He sent bulletins to J. H. Green, noting on Thursday, noon, 30 April: “I am writing as hard as I can put pen to paper, at the Spring Garden Coffee House in defence of the Bill for regulating the labour of the Children in Cotton Factories – and cannot hope to finish it in time to return to Highgate before night…For it must be done now or not at all.”155 Four days later, on Monday, 3 May, he was still at his post in Spring Gardens writing and correcting.

  In practical terms the Bill was the most primitive form of social legislation, simply prohibiting child labour under nine years old, and limiting working hours to less than twelve in twenty-four. But in constitutional terms it was a watershed, setting an historic precedent for government interference in privately owned industry. The Peel family fortune was based on Lancashire cotton mills (indeed the “dark satanic mills” of Blake’s poem “Jerusalem”), and many industrialists regarded both men as traitors, opposing the measure with great bitterness.

  Coleridge had already argued the practical case for state intervention in such cases. But his grounds depended ultimately on the very notions of society and the human soul that he had been discussing as philosophical principles with Tulk. The questions he put to Crabb Robinson clearly show the connection in his mind. “Can you furnish us with any other instances, in which the Legislature has directly, or by immediate consequence, interfered with what is ironically called Free Labour? (i.e. DARED to prohibit Soul-murder and Infanticide on the part of the Rich, and Self-slaughter on that of the Poor).”156

  To Mudford at the Courier he described the condition of the poor cotton factory children as “an abomination, which has weighed on my feelings from earliest manhood, I have been indeed an eyewitness of the direful effects.” The rich manufacturers were blindly justifying such treatment through the “so-called” science of political economy, which allowed them to manage human beings in terms of profit and accountancy, as pure abstractions, “like Geometry”. This was a profoundly false philosophy. “It is a science which begins with abstractions, in order to exclude whatever is not subject to a technical calculation: in the face of all experience, it assumes these as the whole of human nature – and then on an impossible hypothesis builds up the most inhuman edifice, a Temple of Tescalipoca!”157 Tezcatlipoca was the Aztec god, whose throne was built of human skulls.

  Coleridge’s campaigning journalism was as lively as anything in the Watchman, and far more concentrated than anything in the Lay Sermons. First came a polemic letter signed “Plato”, in the Courier, which mixes a Blakean radicalism with biting Swiftian irony. It purported to be from one of Peel’s conservative opponents, terrified of reform.

  This legislation in cases of mere humanity is pregnant with fatal dangers to our most glorious Constitution. A renovated spirit of Luddism will affect these very children, whose present love and veneration for the machines, by which they are enabled to support their aged parents, can only be exceeded by the love and respect they bear towards their indulgent masters. But how fearfully will the scene be changed! Give them but the notion that they are under the protection of the laws, and instead of quietly piercing the yarn, and of cleaning the machinery during dinner, their little hearts will be beating high for radical reform, annual Parliaments, and universal suffrage…Let us then hear no more useless defences of Sir Robert Peel’s Bill.158

  Next came his pamphlet, Remarks on Objections to Peel’s Bill. Here the style is direct and passionate, on broad humanitarian grounds. “But free Labour! – in what sense, not utterly sophistical, can the labour of children, exhorted from the wants of their parents, ‘their poverty, but not their will, consenting’, be called free?…Has it or has it not been proved, that the common result of the present system of labour in the Cotton Factories is disease, of the most painful and wasting kinds, and too often a premature death? This, we repeat, has been fully proved.” Coleridge also made a historic connection with Clarkson’s and Wilberforce’s great campaign against the slave trade. Abolition was the “glorious precedent” that should be followed.159

  Finally, came the pamphlet, The Grounds of Peel’s Bill Vindicated. This was largely a briefing-paper, clarifying and summarizing the medical evidence concerning conditions in the cotton factories, much of it hidden away in a Commons Select Committee Report of 1816, which Coleridge and Robinson had disinterred from Hansard and other sources. It is not literary, but it is impressive in its detail, covering specifics of shop-floor temperatures (up to 85 degrees), air-pollution, and recorded diseases among labouring children (“debility, rickets, scrofula, mesenteric obstruction”). It is notable for the “eminent medical authorities” it cites, including several doctors that Coleridge knew personally (Dr Carlisle, D
r Tuthill) and the great surgeon from Guy’s Hospital who had encouraged Keats, Astley Cooper.160

  The immediate political outcome was much as Coleridge feared. The Bill was passed by the Commons on 30 April 1818, but then blocked by the Lords. Robert Peel (the son) resigned, exhausted by his efforts, but was to return in 1822 as one of the great reforming Home Secretaries. A weakened version of the Bill was eventually passed by both Houses in 1819, but the principle of government intervention was established, and led to a great sequence of Factory Acts and select committees in the early Victorian period.161 It also established the increasing power of journalism, public petition and expert evidence to influence parliament, and this was to be crucial in the years leading up to the Great Reform Bill of 1832.

  Coleridge felt he had played some small part in this movement (as with the slave trade agitation), with his “inefficient yet not feeble Efforts in behalf of the poor little white slaves in the Cotton Factories”, as they seemed to him in retrospect. The experience left him with increasing doubts about Tory social policy, asking himself in February 1819: “But are we not better than other Nations of Christendom? Yes – perhaps – I don’t know – I dare not affirm it. Better than the French, certainly!…But Sweden, Norway, Germany, the Tyrol? – No.”162

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  For a moment in May 1818 it looked very much as if Coleridge might return to the world of politics and public controversy. It was a time of increasing social turmoil. Demand for reform would rise to the bitter climax of “Orator” Hunt’s great public meetings and the Peterloo Massacre the following year. Leigh Hunt’s editorials in the Examiner, Hazlitt’s lectures and reviews, even Keats’s letters, were full of this sense of imminent crisis. As Keats wrote: “This is no contest between Whig and Tory – but between right and wrong. There is scarcely a grain of party spirit now in England. – Right and Wrong considered by each man abstractedly is the fashion.”163*

  But in the event this was to be the last time that Coleridge stepped directly into the political arena. From now on, all his remaining efforts would be concentrated on work that looked beyond the controversies of the day. He was exhausted by his pamphlet-writing, and for much of May and June he was “ill”, very likely from an opium relapse. When Thomas Phillips asked to include him in a series of celebrity portraits, Coleridge refused to let the painter come to Highgate. “I should have substituted a wretched pathognomy for a physiognomy.”164

  He arranged to spend a week away by the sea with J. H. Green, proposing as their relaxation a step-by-step analysis of Schelling. The philosophers quartered themselves at Green’s mother’s house, a large and comfortable establishment amidst extensive gardens near Maldon in Essex. A number of fragmentary philosophical papers and “Dialogues” arose from these discussions, most notably a symposium on “The Sciences and Theology”. The three voices of Coleridge, Green and Gillman are recorded in this paper, with several exchanges that bear on the Theory of Life.165

  Nothing could be further from topical politics. Coleridge was now questioning the validity of Schelling’s system of “Polarity” as put forward in the Naturphilosophie, and trying to establish if there could be an alternative philosophical system which was “the common ground of all Sciences in all classes”.166 He likened this to the astronomer Herschel’s speculation, that while the sun provided the gravitational centre to the solar system, the solar system itself might depend on a gravitational centre elsewhere in the galaxy.167

  Coleridge thought everything would depend on the definition of life itself, and whether this was susceptible to an adequate scientific description, or could only be defined in theological terms. His speculations eventually conclude that all life-sciences describe “Mechanisms” and “Structures”, but not the grounds of life itself. “You see clearly that Life is not a result of structure generally – or a watch would be alive.” Instead one must assume a primary act of “Creation”, and a continual process of “transition” by which creative “power” is diversified through the physical universe. Coleridge would eventually trace this up the whole scale of evolution, a process of “Individuation” which became the central subject of his Theory of Life. The result is not quite “Evolution” as Lamark or Darwin understood it, but a Platonized version of Schelling: “the power which discloses itself from within as a principle of unity in the many.”168

  Coleridge was happy at Maldon, working amidst “a perfect Blaze of Roses”, and potting up local plants to bring back to the garden at Highgate. The house was surrounded by flowering beanfields, and from a wooded hill above them there was a view of the open sea that reminded him of Stowey and Alfoxden. The local cottagers seemed comfortably off, and there was no talk of political disaffection, but “an abundance of Cream”. The only drawbacks were a plague of gnats, and a shortage of snuff. He wrote reassuringly to Ann Gillman, that for all the delights of the Green household, he felt nothing could now replace Highgate: “I feel more and more that I can be well off nowhere away from you and Gillman…again & again & again God bless you, my most dear Friends.”169

  When Coleridge returned in July, all thoughts of further political activity had dissipated. He determined to concentrate on completing his revisions of The Friend, and had a vague idea for “a novel or romance” which would dramatize his new theories of the “constructive Philosophy”. Perhaps it would be something like Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen, but the problem of “form” perplexed him. In discussing this with Green, he imagined a philosophic “dialogue” in the framework of a walking-tour. It would start in a library with introductory “lessons”; then move to a cavern by the seashore for “theosophical” conversations; then stride up over the moors for “Travel-Talk”; linger by the lakes for “Ethics”; and finally climb to the mountain tops for “Religion”.170

  It reflected his own life at Highgate. Rather than moving downstream from the hills to city, he was moving back up into the hills and high visionary places. He was moving from the topical to the eternal. He would rise above the ephemeral attacks of the world. “Little does that man know me, who supposes that the Hunts, Hazlitts, Jeffreys, etc. have ever inflicted one serious pang,” he assured Green.

  For the first time too, he spoke of the idea that Green “and one or two others” who would survive him might carry on his work. They might edit his papers, protect his “calumniated” reputation, and prevent others “pillaging” his ideas with impunity.171 Clearly some tacit agreement was reached at Maldon, and from now on Green began to consider himself both as a future executor and possibly as a collaborator on a philosophic summa, the long-projected Opus Maximum. He also attended to more worldly matters, and took over the annual payments of Coleridge’s life assurance policy.

  Charles Lamb sent his own form of greetings up to Highgate. The first two-volume collection of his prose and verse Works (1818) was dedicated to Coleridge in an affectionate Preface, recalling their friendship going back to schooldays. “The world has given you many a shrewd nip and gird since that time, but either my eyes are grown dimmer, or my old friend is the same who stood before me three and twenty years ago, his hair a little confessing the hand of time, but still shrouding the same capacious brain – his heart not altered, scarcely where it ‘alteration finds’.”172

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  The revised edition of The Friend, in three handsome volumes, finally appeared in November 1818. It was now dedicated to “Mr and Mrs Gillman of Highgate”, and made no mention at all of the circumstances in which it was originally composed at Allan Bank. “I owe in great measure the power of having written at all to your medical skill,” he wrote to Gillman in the dedication; adding that Mrs Gillman had provided “almost a mother’s watchful and unwearied solicitudes”.173

  Coleridge cut other links with the past by removing Wordsworth’s sonnets and his “Essay on Epitaphs”, and rewriting the opening essays. He cut his own poems, and the travel-letters from Germany (which had reappeared at the end of the Biographia), but kept the “literary amusements intersp
ersed” including a beautifully polished and moving version of Sir Alexander Ball’s biography.

  The problem of revising his past, in a political sense, also haunted the early part of the work. How would he deal with the revolutionary years of the 1790s? He left in his essay on Pantisocracy, “Enthusiasm for an Ideal World”, virtually untouched. But he added a skilfully softened version of his political lectures at Bristol, in the heady days of 1795, from his pamphlet Conciones ad Populum (1795). Coleridge tried to show the continuity of his position by adding new references to the recent cotton children campaign and suppressing older ones attacking oppressive government and defending certain English Jacobins transported to Australia in 1794. (In an explanatory note to Morgan, he added: “Written by Southey. I never saw these men.”)174 It must all have seemed a long time ago.

  The single biggest addition, now a substantial treatise of some two hundred pages in volume 3, was his “Essay on the Principles of Method”. It was adapted from his ill-starred Introduction to the Encyclopaedia. He came to consider this, rightly, as one of his outstanding pieces of later prose.175 Coleridge begins with a deceptively simple question: “What is it that first strikes us, and strikes us at once, in a man of education? And which, among educated men, so instantly distinguishes the man of superior mind, that (as was observed with eminent propriety of the late Edmund Burke) ‘we cannot stand under the same archway during a shower of rain, without finding him out?’.”176

  The obvious answer, that it is breadth of knowledge, encyclopaedic capacity, “a mere repository or banqueting-room” of information, is soon dismissed.177 Instead, Coleridge develops a highly sophisticated concept of “intellectual Method”. This is the “germinal power” of ordering and relatings facts and ideas through “progressive transition”, and the grasp of the underlying principles and laws which generate them.178 “Method, therefore, becomes natural to the mind which has been accustomed to contemplate not things only, or for their sake alone, but likewise and chiefly the relations of things.”179 Considering the closeness of this terminology to his scientific speculations in A Theory of Life, one can glimpse here a fascinating parallel (or unified) theory of the physical “evolution” of biological forms, and the cultural “evolution” of mental powers.