I cannot describe it. There was a heat and dampness in the hand. To say that his death was caused by the Review is absurd, but at the same time it is impossible adequately to conceive the effect which it must have had on his mind. It is all very well for those who have a place in the world and are independent to talk of these things, they can bear such a blow, so can those who have a strong religious principle. But all men are not born Philosophers, and all men have not those advantages of birth and education. Poor Keats had not, and it is impossible as I say to conceive the effect which such a Review must have had upon him, knowing as he did that he had his own way to make in the world by his own exertions, and conscious of the genius within him.35
Coleridge’s sympathy evidently reflects his own experience of devastating criticism from Blackwood’s and the Edinburgh Review. Coleridge also told Frere that he had read two sonnets of Keats’s, and “a poem with a classical name” – “Hyperion.” So he may have been strangely struck by the lines at the end of the opening verse stanza, “When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave”.36
He thought increasingly of Keats in his final years, and one of the many young men who visited him from Cambridge remembered him reading aloud, “with keen delight”, the whole of “St Agnes Eve” one winter evening at Highgate. The listener was Tennyson’s friend, Arthur Hallam.37 When in 1829 the Paris publisher Galignani produced a pirated anthology of three English poets, Coleridge was moved to discover that his work had been chosen alongside that of Keats and Shelley.38 He had become one of the young English poets again, and Keats had paid the long-delayed visit to Highgate after all.
8
Coleridge had now been settled at Moreton House for three years, a period of stability at one address longer than any time since his departure from Greta Hall in 1803. His sense that his life was coming under control, that his family flourished, that he was surrounded by friends and a growing circle of admirers, seemed assured. But he was now destined to receive a series of bitter shocks that once again shook him to the foundations.
They began in the summer of 1819. Economic conditions throughout England had continued their post-war decline, and the hardships of the factory workers (which he had written about so eloquently) now spread inexorably to small business owners and retailers. More and more bankruptcies were declared, and two of these touched him closely. In April, Blackwood’s Magazine, which had started carrying monthly listings of business failures, announced that the publisher Rest Fenner was among them. Initially Coleridge was not much alarmed, and saw it as an opportunity to open negotiations with a more sympathetic house, Taylor and Hessey, the publisher of Cary and Keats.39 But he was desperately concerned when, in May, his old friend and erstwhile amanuensis John Morgan also went bankrupt for the second time.
Morgan suffered a dangerous stroke, and Coleridge hurried down to their house in Camberwell. He was frightened by Morgan’s state, which was partly paralysed, but tried to convince everyone that it would improve. Then, quite unexpectedly, something Mary Morgan said – some reproach or reference to the opium scenes at Ashley and Bath – plunged him back into a series of nightmare memories about his own chaotic past.
His Notebooks record two profoundly unsettling dreams. The first was the haunting memory of his struggles with Wordsworth over Asra, and the terrible Saturday at Coleorton in 1807, when he had believed he had seen them in bed together, “Wordsworth and SH, mammia pulcherrima aperta” (in Greek transcription), Asra with her most beautiful breasts displayed.40 But the second dream, on the following night, released an even more terrifying series of guilts and regrets.
He believed the Morgans had come to hate him, were murderously jealous of his life at Highgate, and would destroy him with revelations about his behaviour under opium. “I have this morning had a fearful dream in which I saw Mrs Morgan, threatening to publish all my letters to them, shewing how grateful I felt myself – and to abuse these over-flying feelings of Gratitude to give confirmation to their scandalous Lies. – Then poor J. J. Morgan himself, frightfully distorted with Palsy, attempting with shaking and tottering limbs to assassinate me, first with a pen knife and then with a Razor.”41
The odd congruity of the two dreams suggests that Coleridge’s night-fears of scandal and revenge included revelations of his sexual feelings for Charlotte, which the Morgans had countenanced, and which his letters of that troubled time had indeed exposed. The past had not been laid to rest, even at Highgate.
Morgan declined towards a tragically premature death. When in November he had a second, more severe stroke, depriving him of speech and movement in his right side, Mary Morgan’s first instinct was to rush up to Highgate in a carriage to see Coleridge. He at once returned with her to Camberwell, organized doctors, and remained by Morgan’s bedside with her and Charlotte for several days. He wrote bulletins to their friends, trying to be optimistic, “eager to hope”, while realizing there was in reality no possibility of recovery.42
He spoke warmly of his “honoured Friend”, and praised the selflessness and practical energy of the man to whom he owed so much. “Whatever Mr Morgan undertook to do, he always did it as if his Life was in it – tho’ for the advantage of others: because he believed that was what has been ever dearer to him than Life…”43 After John Morgan’s death that winter, Mary and Charlotte continued to visit Coleridge, and several times asked for financial help which he always somehow managed to supply even as late as 1829. In that year he received an advance of £30 on a new edition of his poems, and immediately sent them £20 of it, a typical gesture of his gratitude.
Yet these night-hauntings also suggested a submerged world of guilts, fears and frustrated longings, that never entirely left him at Highgate. If the outward man appeared more solid, more tranquil, more genial than ever before – the familiar white-haired figure, so kindly and so talkative, ensconced in his Highgate study or perambulating over the margins of Hampstead Heath – the inner man remained anxious, unstable, self-questioning, even at times furtive and childlike. It found expression not only in his dreams, but also in a renewed recourse to illicit opium-taking, and the sudden welling-up of his late poetry, so much of it concerned with themes of self-doubt, depression or incipient despair.
Now in his old age – or what he felt as such, recording on his forty-eighth birthday in October 1820, “in Life, if not in years I am, alas! nearer to 68” – any incident or setback could throw him back upon this second, trembling, inner self.44 He would describe it, with great feeling and psychological acuity, in letters to a few chosen intimates, all of them from the younger generation, like Thomas Allsop, whom he felt understood him and appreciated him better than his contemporaries. He would also find Ann Gillman becoming his greatest confidante, and the last really close emotional attachment of his life. It would be to her that much of his late poetry was directed.
Being Coleridge, he also philosophized about it, pushing through a characteristic form of psychological self-analysis towards some kind of religious consolation. In the midst of a complex series of “Chemico-Philosophical” notes made with Green, touching on the dialectical constructions of the German Naturphilosophien and ideas of biological evolution, he suddenly broke off to examine his own spiritual state.45
He began, as in much of the poetry, with a recognition of bleakness and a stretching inner wasteland. “In Youth, our Happiness is Hope: in Age, The Recollection of the Hopes of Youth. What else can there be? For the substantial Mind, for the I, what else can there be? Pleasure? Fruition?…It is the Death of the I – a neutral Product results that may exist for another, but no longer for itself – a Coke or Slag.”
From this bleak truth, that sense of alienation from the young productive self which is such a common experience of age, Coleridge sought a philosophy of reclamation and redemption through rediscovering the self in others. His terms are highly compressed and Kantian; the subject must be rediscovered in the object, but the moral or human meaning is simple and even traditional. We can red
eem the self in age by loving the other, whether it is a domestic pet, a human friend or God himself in the sacramental. “To make the Object one with us, we must become one with the Object – ergo, an Object. Ergo the object must be itself a Subject – partially, a favourite dog – principally, a friend; wholly, God – the Friend. God is Love – i.e. an Object that is absolutely Subject – (God is a Spirit) but a Subject that for ever condescends to become Object for those that meet Him subjectively – Eucharist.”46 Such meditations would feed into his poetry and find public expression in his last important book, the Aids to Reflection.
9
While he worked away with Green, he was consoled with other fruits, the first crop of cherries and strawberries from Mrs Green’s garden at St Lawrence.47 But the world continued to press in upon Coleridge. By July 1819 it had become clear that the Rest Fenner bankruptcy would affect him disastrously. There had been irregularities in the accounting of his book-sales, large royalties had been due but not paid, and all his copyrights had fallen into the control of Fenner’s creditors. Both the Biographia and the Sibylline Leaves had, unknown to him, effectively sold out – a cause for great satisfaction, except that none of the earnings had ever been made over to him. Five hundred copies of the Friend (out of the edition of 750) were also held against Fenner’s debts, with the prospect of being pulped. No royalties had been paid on the Lay Sermons or Zapolya, and Fenner’s last financial life-raft, the part-work Encyclopaedia which had been largely sold on the strength of Coleridge’s Introduction, had sunk without trace.48
The full implications of all this did not emerge until the autumn of 1819. But it was, in financial terms, the greatest professional blow of Coleridge’s life. With the exception of Murray’s “Christabel” volume, Coleridge had lost the earnings and copyright on everything he had published since his return to London in 1816. Fenner’s bankruptcy put this beyond any hope of legal redress.
The final position at the end of 1819 was that Coleridge had used all his small reserves from the Crown and Anchor lectures (intended for Derwent) to buy back his copyrights. He had also lost royalties initially calculated at £1,000, but finally thought to be nearer £1,200. All he effectively retained was the right to republish his poems if a new publisher could ever be found; and of this there was no immediate prospect. All the years of accumulated work he had counted on to fund his children, and support himself at Highgate, had come to nothing.49
When he wrote to his friends of this bitter news, he tried to be philosophical and even light-hearted. “You have perhaps heard, that my Publisher is a bankrupt”, he told Allsop, “and his Bankruptcy has disclosed a scene of fraud on the part of the Reverend Thomas Curtis (nb. by virtue of a shilling licence) and of infatuation on the part of Fenner…Well! I am now sole proprietor…This is rather hard – but perhaps my Comet may some time or other have its perihelion of popularity and then the Tail, you know, whisks round to the other end and for 0000I, low and behold, 10000.”50 But this was little short of bravado.
The Gillmans, who were themselves implicated in the disaster, immediately recognized the depth of the crisis, both in its practical implications and its effect on Coleridge’s self-belief. They responded in the simplest and kindest way possible. They swept Coleridge off for another long holiday by the sea.
10
This time they went to Ramsgate, an expanding new resort on the north Kent coast. Originally a fishing village under the chalk cliffs of the North Foreland, it had flourished during the war, and sprouted new terraces with patriotic names – Nelson, Wellington, Albion. Its harbour and pier were rebuilt, bathing-machines were introduced, and a visit by George IV and his mistress in 1821 was commemorated by a Theban obelisk which became known locally as “the Royal Toothpick”. Already the place was fashionable – the Prime Minister Lord Liverpool had a villa there – but still relatively inexpensive. It could be reached in a few hours, either by the mail coach through Rochester, or by a new steamer service that plied from St Katherine’s Docks in the City, and down through the Thames estuary without having to wait upon the tides.
They found lodgings at the very top of the East Cliff, in the newly completed Wellington Crescent (1818), commanding from its charming ironwork balconies a superb view of the North Sea and Goodwin Sands (where ships were regularly wrecked). A crooked flight of ancient fishermen’s steps, Kent Place, led down to the beach and harbour. Here they remained until the end of August, with Gillman commuting back in the mid-week to look after his practice. The arrangement worked so well that the visit to Ramsgate, at various addresses on the East Cliff, and with various combinations of friends, became an annual fixture for the rest of his life.
A new intimacy and confidence grew between Coleridge and Ann Gillman. The first lines of “The Garden of Boccaccio” (later dedicated to her) appeared in his Notebooks, set off by the sight of a “Child collecting shells and pebbles on the Sea shore”. The child’s “fresh shout of Delight and Admiration” with each new shape, carried proudly to its mother and then carelessly flung back on to the sand, was a type of “our first discoveries both in Science and Philosophy”.51
At Ramsgate, Coleridge found that he could himself revert to the condition of a child on the beach. Each morning he set out alone to a secret cave he had found a mile and a quarter away along the East Cliff. This was at Dumpton Gap (a supposed lair of eighteenth-century smugglers), reached by a sunken lane cut steeply down through the chalk rocks to the shore-line. “Exactly a hundred of my Strides from the end of the Lane there is a good roomy arched Cavern, with an Oven or cupboard in it where one’s clothes may be put free from the sand.” Here he stripped off and had “a glorious tumble in the waves”.52
His anxieties slipped away with his clothes, and his memories went back to other shores: the plunges from the sunlit rocks at Malta, the freezing swims when he was visiting Asra near Scarborough, the schoolboy bathing in the New River, the childhood paddles in the river Otter near the Pixies Parlour Cave. Only when he dressed again, and made his way back through “the deep crumbly Sands” beneath the East Cliff, did he feel the “wearisome Travail” of the walk home, his dragging legs reminding him that he was no longer young.*
The feeling would prompt his beautiful poem “Youth and Age”, completed at Ramsgate two years later:
When I was young? – Ah, woful When!
Ah! for the change ‘twixt Now and Then!
This breathing house not built with hands,
This body that does me grievous wrong,
O’er aery cliffs and glittering sands,
How lightly then it flashed along: –
Like those trim skiffs, unknown of yore,
On winding lakes and rivers wide,
That ask no aid of sail or oar,
That fear no spite of wind or tide!
Nought cared this body for wind or weather
When Youth and I lived in’t together.53
11
Coleridge pursued negotiations with several publishers – Blackwood’s Magazine, John Murray, Taylor and Hessey – which went on into the autumn, but without result. By the time he was back at Highgate, his friends had taken stock of his financial situation and, one by one, they discreetly came to his aid. Not all the details of their generosity are known; some did not emerge until after Coleridge’s death and others may never be known. The Gillmans simply waived their lodging charges, and there is no evidence that they were ever resumed in full. Thomas Allsop sent a gift of £100 in October, which reduced Coleridge to tears. “Why should I be ashamed to say this –? For such tears and such only will be shed at the threshold of the Gate, within which all tears will be wiped away.”54
Green quietly confirmed that he would continue to pay Coleridge’s annual life assurance premium. John Hookam Frere took over the fund to send Derwent to Cambridge in 1820, as Coleridge had promised, contributing at least £300.55 Daniel Stuart, his old editor, began the custom of sending Coleridge each summer £20 or £30 to pay for his Ramsgate
holiday, and this arrangement never lapsed. It is likely that Charles Aders, and C. A. Tulk, both wealthy men, also quietly helped him with birthday or Christmas gifts.
So Coleridge never achieved the professional independence strived for and dreamed of for a lifetime, but finally snatched from him by the Rest Fenner disaster of 1819. There would also be further financial crises in connection with his children, especially Hartley; and he never forgot that at Greta Hall he was looked on as a father who had never managed to provide properly for his family. When in August 1821 Thomas De Quincey quite unexpectedly applied for the return of the £300 donated at Bristol in 1807, Coleridge replied with a long and grim recital of his financial disasters since 1816, and refused him.
But in so doing, he also revealed the astonishing generosity of the Gillmans. “I declare solemnly, that I must have wanted the necessities of Life, but for the almost unprecedented friendship of Mr and Mrs Gillman, under whose roof I live. Tho’ the nominal sum, which I am engaged to contribute towards the expenses of the House, is barely adequate to the first-cost of my actual maintenance – and tho’ medicine, & medical attendance are not put down at all – yet so many sums have been paid by Mr G. on my account – that at this moment I stand indebted to him for £500…” There is every reason to believe this sum simply mounted over the remaining years.
But Coleridge in turn gave something to the Gillmans and their household that was equally valued, if less tangible. His presence certainly boosted Gillman’s medical reputation throughout North London, and Coleridge began to make humorous references to this.56 But he also became an irreplaceable family confidant*eacute; and advisor, trusted and greatly liked by the Gillman boys as they grew up, and bringing an emotional warmth to Ann Gillman’s life that her busy husband did not always have time to provide. By 1824 Ann Gillman could write confidentially to Coleridge, after a brief misunderstanding, “indeed I feel for you as formerly, and know not how to bear up against the fear, even, of losing you”.57
Coleridge- Darker Reflections Page 60
