Jane and Dorothy

by Marian Veevers

  The project, which they called Pantisocracy, was more than a theory. They really intended to carry it out until it foundered on a lack of money and disagreements between Coleridge and Southey. It drew on Rousseau’s ideas about the virtues to be found in nature and the vices that inevitably follow from an urban existence. It also incorporated William Godwin’s radical teachings on shared ownership of property. Her willingness to join in this scheme says a great deal about the young Sarah; it would have required extraordinary courage for a woman of her time to consider such an undertaking.

  Perhaps the inclusion of Sarah and Edith in the discussions had the effect of introducing an element of what we would now call feminism into Pantisocracy. Perhaps they were able to point out to their idealistic lovers that women could only achieve the freedom to study if they were not tied entirely to domestic duties, for, unlike most radical and revolutionary philosophies of the time, Pantisocracy embraced a degree of gender equality. This is how Coleridge himself foresaw the division of labour in their community:

  ‘Let the married Women do only what is absolutely convenient and customary for pregnant Women or nurses. Let 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 . . .  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.’12

  As her life progressed, Dorothy Wordsworth was to find herself increasingly restricted by the burdens of domestic life, a fate she shared with Jane Austen and thousands of other intelligent women in a time when simply maintaining a modicum of comfort in a home and getting meals on the table involved incessant labour: when fires must be lit and maintained to heat ovens, when every drop of water must be carried from a pump or well, when chamber-pots must be emptied, when shirts must be sewn and sheets washed by hand. (Most Georgian housewives seem to have had no access to that mysterious washing machine which Coleridge meant to use in America.)

  It was widely accepted at the time that such work was a woman’s lot. However, while it is wise, as we consider the past, to remember the differences in attitudes that belong to different ages, and important not to judge too freely by our own standards, it is also worthwhile to note that sometimes those in possession of a privilege may recognise its injustice and yet retain it. Notions of equality had emerged among the people with whom Dorothy lived, but had been deliberately discarded when they proved inconvenient. A redistribution of chores was one revolutionary idea which could have changed her life entirely.

  When he laid the plans for his Utopia, Coleridge clearly knew little about housework or babies. In fact, he and his friend seem to have been remarkably ignorant about physical labour of any kind. ‘When Coleridge and I are sawing down a tree,’ fantasised Robert Southey, ‘we shall discuss metaphysics: criticise poetry when hunting a buffalo, and write sonnets whilst following the plough.’13

  However, Coleridge’s ideas about equality in marriage outlived the Pantisocratic American Dream. After the project was abandoned and he and Sarah moved into their little cottage, there was enough idealism left to keep him from Wordsworth’s fear of vegetation. His marriage – though it might have been ‘hurried on’ by gossip – began very happily and he intended ‘to work very hard as Cook, Butler, Scullion, Shoe-cleaner, occasional Nurse, Gardener, Hind, Pig-protector, Chaplain, Secretary, Poet and Reviewer . . . ’14

  How fortunate Sarah must have thought herself to have won such an enlightened, considerate husband! However, by the time Dorothy Wordsworth came into their lives, Sarah had seen alarming changes in the man she loved: changes in his ideas, and changes in the man himself. A married man now, with a baby, a vegetable patch and a pig, Coleridge had a more realistic view of all kinds of physical labour and he was much less enthusiastic about undertaking it. His ideals were not substantial enough to stand against the rigours of real life. Maybe this is an indication that it was Sarah who had urged the rights of women in their discussions, and Coleridge fell out of love with the ideals as he fell out of love with the woman who had inspired them.

  As the three members of the Concern rambled about and talked, on the hills and in the wooded coombes of Somerset a literary revolution began to grow. Meanwhile, down in the damp cottage by the village sewer, Sarah Coleridge nursed her baby and got on with the housework. But she also nursed a secret, of which Dorothy was to remain ignorant for many years.

  The change in Coleridge that had taken place since the heady days of Pantisocracy was, in a large part, due to the lethargy of a drug addict. Opium – probably first given to him during a teenage attack of rheumatic fever – was becoming more and more necessary and was beginning to produce the ill-health, the irritable temper, the inability to work and the dishonesty which commonly accompany opiate addiction. The loyal Sarah said nothing of this to his new friends, even though Coleridge could not help making comparisons between the two young women with whom he now shared his life.

  Thomas de Quincey, in his Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets, would claim that Dorothy’s advent had a detrimental effect on the Coleridges’ relationship. He said that Dorothy’s ‘superiority . . .  when made conspicuous by its effects in winning Coleridge’s regard and society, could not but be deeply mortifying to a young wife.’15

  De Quincey believed that that superiority was intellectual, but it seems unlikely that there was much wrong with the intelligence of the woman who had shared in the birth of Pantisocracy. Also, years later, wishing her extremely clever daughter to learn Italian, Sarah set about learning the language herself so that she might teach it to her; and she was much more successful in her efforts than Dorothy ever was in her desultory assaults on German.

  Dorothy would herself identify Mrs Coleridge’s ‘radical fault’, not as stupidity, but as ‘want of sensibility’16. There was certainly a reserve, a lack of spontaneous friendship, about Sarah Coleridge, not dissimilar to Jane Austen’s avoidance of intimacy, and the relationship between these two women gives us a hint of how Dorothy and Jane might have got on if they had ever met.

  The difference between Sarah and Dorothy is captured in a story that was told about this period in Dorothy’s life. It seems that sometimes, when she had been caught in the rain on a walk, Dorothy would help herself to dry clothes from Sarah’s wardrobe without asking her permission and ‘make herself merry with her own unceremoniousness and Mrs Coleridge’s gravity. In all this, she took no liberty that she would not most readily have granted in return; she confided too unthinkingly in what she regarded as the natural privileges of friendship.’17 (Perhaps Sarah would not have found the communal ownership of property as easy as she had imagined!)

  It is likely to have been Dorothy’s capacity for unreserved friendship which won her Coleridge’s ‘regard and society’, for he was now moving away from the intellectual radicalism which had inspired him when Sarah first found him irresistible, and, like William, he was finding meaning instead in an emotional response to nature and his fellow-men.

  Dorothy would have been a devoted friend, listening closely to everything William and Coleridge said. Sarah, struggling to care for her child and her visitors with only the help of a not very effective maidservant18, had not time – or perhaps inclination – to listen as avidly to the men around her as Dorothy had. She could not, or would not, leave little Hartley as Dorothy left Basil, in order to join in those extended rambles.

  De Quincey would describe Dorothy as a highly skilled listener. ‘The pulses of light,’ he said, ‘are not more quick or more inevitable in their flow and undulation, than were the answering and echoing movements of her sympathizing attention.’19 She would have been a delightful companion to any man who liked to talk, and Dorothy’s new friend certainly liked to talk. (‘C[oleridge] will let nobody talk but himself’, remarked Lady Beaumont in 1812)20. Perhaps Dorothy had heeded the advice that she had read long ago in John Gregory’s A Father’s Leg
acy to his Daughters. ‘The art of pleasing in conversation consists in making the company pleased with themselves,’ Dr Gregory explained. ‘You will more readily hear than talk yourselves into their good graces.’

  It was very good counsel if a young lady’s aim was to please the male sex (and pleasing the male sex is the end of all Gregory’s advice). Coleridge enjoyed Dorothy’s rapt attention as much as Dr Gregory, and other writers of conventional conduct manuals, knew a gentleman would enjoy the company of a woman who listened rather than talked.

  Soon – with the neediness common to drug addicts – Coleridge would come to wish he might have such a charming, self-deprecating woman for his own constant companion. His wife had, of course, married in the expectation of a rather more equal partnership; all that talk of shared housework and equal opportunities to study, had not led her to expect to have to listen constantly to her husband. But Coleridge had already abandoned Wollstonecraft’s proto-feminism and he would eventually conclude: ‘The perfection of every woman is to be characterless. Creatures who, though they may not always understand you . . . always feel with you.’21

  This is a chilling, derogatory assessment of a woman’s role and value, but it is not original. It was a recurring refrain of conduct literature of the time that women should suppress their own ideas and allow men to hold forth on Big Issues uninterrupted. Laetitia Matilda Hawkins, who was distressed by Helen Maria Williams publishing her reflections on the French Revolution, said ‘I do not ask women to have no opinion on the subject; but, for decorum’s sake, do not encourage them to a tilting match’. Wetenhall Wilkes went further, advising that a sensible wife should perform an astonishing feat of self-obliteration and ‘be sure never to have any private opinions of her own’.

  Dorothy was far from characterless, but Coleridge’s enthusiasm for her company, when it is placed in the context of his developing notions of femininity, raises the disquieting possibility that the Concern was founded on rather conventional gender roles, and that Dorothy may have been regarded – by one of her companions at least – as a means of furthering his own ends, affirming his own sense of self, rather than as an individual in her own right.

  If an important part of Dorothy’s role during those long walks on the Quantock Hills was passive and supportive, the journal which she began to keep at Alfoxton proves that she was also finding time to observe for herself and develop her own response to the things that she saw around her.

  The Alfoxton Journal opens on 20th January 1798 and is, apart from her letters, Dorothy’s first literary effort: or, at least, the earliest to survive. It begins confidently with a vivid description of the scene:

  ‘The green paths down the hill-sides are channels for streams. The young wheat is streaked by silver lines of water running between the ridges, the sheep are gathered together on the slopes. After the wet dark days, the country seems more populous. It peoples itself in the sunbeams . . .  The slanting woods of an unvarying brown, showing the light through the thin net-work of their upper boughs. Upon the highest ridge of that round hill covered with planted oaks, the shafts of the trees show in the light like the columns of a ruin.’

  Dorothy was a meticulous observer, giving equal attention to everything, from the sunbeams and the oaks to the wet sheep gathering on the hill. She was simply being in nature, both seeing it and attempting to be a part of it.

  We do not know why Dorothy started this journal. Maybe she began to write down her impressions because Coleridge was away from Stowey at the time and she wished to be able to share with him the scenes he had missed. Four years later she would begin her Grasmere Journal when William left on a journey and say that part of its purpose was to ‘give William pleasure’. Perhaps she hoped that this journal would give Coleridge pleasure when he returned on 9th February.22 But she seems to have enjoyed the experience of recording her impressions enough to continue after the constituent parts of the Concern were reunited.

  The journal records almost daily meetings with Coleridge. To take one week in February for example: ‘I walked to Stowey before dinner’ (19th) ‘Coleridge came in the morning . . . ’ (21st) ‘Coleridge came in the morning to dinner.’ (22nd) ‘William walked with Coleridge in the morning.’ (23rd) ‘Coleridge came in the morning’ (26th).

  Most of Dorothy’s journal is taken up with observation of the world around her. ‘Brown fallows, the springing wheat, like a shade of green over the brown earth, and the choice meadow plots . . . of a soft and vivid green; a few wreaths of blue smoke, spreading along the ground; the oaks and beeches in the hedges retaining their yellow leaves . . . ’ (February 24th).

  She observed every detail and, with her companions, attempted to lose herself in the scene. ‘We lay sidelong on the turf,’ she wrote of the 26th February, ‘and gazed on the landscape till it melted into more than natural loveliness. The sea very uniform, of a pale greyish blue, only one distant bay, bright and blue as a sky . . . ’

  Even at this moment of oneness, with the scene melting into supernatural loveliness, Dorothy was capable of looking with the eye of a painter, or a student of the picturesque, for she found the prospect of the sea not quite complete. ‘Had there been a vessel sailing up it, a perfect image of delight,’ she concluded. There was, perhaps, little of the mystic in Dorothy; she does not – either in the Alfoxton Journal or elsewhere in her writing – touch upon that ‘perception of the harmony of all things’ which was her brother’s end in observing nature.

  Her wish to compose pictures, to somehow improve upon the scene that she saw, would appear much more frequently in her later travel writing. Most of the Alfoxton Journal is simply a faithful and vivid record of the world that she experienced: ‘A duller night than last night:’ she wrote on 24th March, ‘a sort of white shade over the blue sky. The stars dim . . .  Some brambles I observed to-day budding afresh and those have shed their old leaves. The crooked arm of the old oak tree points upwards to the moon.’

  It is as if she wished to capture an essence: to fix not just the beauty, but the reality of the scenes she saw by pinning them down with words, by remembering them exactly.

  William’s poetry would constantly seek for the significance of the natural world and his response to it.

  ‘Come forth into the life of things,

  Let nature be your teacher.’

  And:

  ‘One impulse from a vernal wood,

  May teach you more of man

  Of moral evil and of good

  Than all the sages can.’23

  Also, in the preface to Lyrical Ballads (poems which he was composing at this time) William would write that though he had given descriptions of ‘situations from common life’ it had been his aim to ‘throw over them a certain colouring of imagination whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect.’

  In her journal, Dorothy did not seek beyond the veil of nature for universal truths, nor attempt to colour with the imagination. She rarely ventured beyond description. It has been said, ‘In her writings, the natural world, in all its delicate detail stands as the end point of vision.’24 However, it is hard to know whether, at this time, Dorothy’s observations were finding their way into the visions – and the poems – of the two men who shared her walks. There are tantalising echoes. On 4th February, for example, she noted in her journal a fence: ‘The moss rubbed from the pailings by the sheep, that leave locks of wool, and the red marks with which they are spotted, upon the wood.’ In William’s poem The Excursion (which was begun at this time25) there is this description:

  ‘The corner stones, on either side the porch,

  With dull red stains discoloured, and stuck o’er

  With tufts and hairs of wool, as if the sheep,

  That fed upon the common, thither came . . . ’

  And, on 7th March, Dorothy described how ‘Only one leaf upon the top of a tree – the sole remaining leaf – danced round and round like a rag blown by the wind.’
In his poem Christabel, Coleridge would write of:

  ‘The last red leaf, the last of its clan

  That dances as often as dance it can

  Hanging so light, and hanging so high,

  On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.’26

  It is tempting to think that both men referred to Dorothy’s descriptions when they wrote their poems. But we can only be sure that ideas were shared. For, even if Dorothy’s account was the first to be written down, there is a part of the creative process now entirely lost: there is no recapturing the conversations that took place on the Quantocks during that slow cold spring. By the time the trio returned, breathless and windblown, to the grand drawing room of Alfoxton, or the overcrowded, stuffy parlour at Nether Stowey, they had probably already forgotten who had started which idea, created which metaphor, or noticed which detail of the natural world.

  Dorothy was not walking, thinking, or writing alone. She was an essential part of the Concern.

  Sixteen

  Poetry and Prose

  It was not in Jane’s nature to share every thought as it arose in her mind. She was alone in the dressing room at Steventon. There were no geniuses around her to walk with and listen to, to spark ideas or to influence her opinions, to encourage her – or, by comparison, to undermine her confidence in her own abilities.

  She continued to write although still interrupted by family visits. August and September of 1798 were passed at Godmersham Park where her brother Edward had recently moved his family. Mrs Knight, now a widow, had given up the house to her adopted son and moved to Canterbury.