The popularity of the Institution’s lectures so often jammed Albemarle Street with carriages that it eventually became the first one-way thoroughfare in London. The programme of 1808 included Davy on chemistry, Coleridge on poetry, and other experts on botany, architecture, German music, mechanics, and Persian literature.24
Though dogged by financial difficulties, the Institution’s founder Count Rumford had entirely refurbished the Great Lecture Room in 1802, to become “the most beautiful and convenient in Europe”, with superb acoustics so that even “a whisper may be distinctly heard”. It held up to 500 people in a hemisphere of steeply tiered seats, with a gallery above and a circle of gas lamps, creating an atmosphere both intimate and intensely theatrical. It was a setting that demanded the speakers not merely to lecture, but to perform. (When Sydney Smith lectured on moral philosophy the previous year, it was said that the laughter could be heard outside in the street.) The attention of the audience was sustained by various creature comforts: green cushioned seating, green baize floor coverings, and the latest in central heating systems using copper pipes.
Albemarle Street was crowded with carriages, and the seats were packed. Coleridge launched into the concept of “Taste” in poetry before a large and attentive audience: “What is there in the primary sense of the word, which may give to its metaphorical meaning an import different from that of Sight or Hearing on the one hand, and of Touch or Feeling on the other?”25 It went well, Coleridge felt, and “made an impression far beyond its worth or my expectation”.
But on returning to his lodgings in the Strand, he immediately collapsed with sickness and continuous agonizing pain “of Stomach & Bowels”. He postponed the next two lectures – “I disappoint hundreds” – and tried again on Friday, 5 February, but again collapsed with “acrid scalding evacuations, and if possible worse Vomitings”.26
It was this lecture that De Quincey witnessed, when he came down to London on business for Wordsworth. He reported that Mr Coleridge was “exceedingly ill” and gave only “one extempore illustration” in his talk. But twenty years later his memories of Coleridge at the dais had ripened. “His appearance was generally that of a person struggling with pain and overmastering illness. His lips were baked with feverish heat, and often black in colour; and, in spite of water which he continued drinking through the whole course of the lecture, he often seemed to labour under an almost paralytic inability to raise the upper jaw from the lower.”
There was “no heart, no soul” in anything he said. When he failed to appear for any of the remaining lectures in February, Albemarle Street was blocked each Friday with smart carriages and scurrying footmen, as the news of his continued illness first excited “concern” and then increasing “disgust”. The whole series, concluded De Quincey, was an inevitable disaster: ill-prepared, badly illustrated with quotations (except for “two or three, which I put ready marked into his hands”) and unevenly delivered. He later thought no written record of it survived, and implied that Coleridge had offended the Institution managers and did not fulfil his contract.27
The original contract had specified twenty-five lectures, twice weekly in the winter season, from January to March, for a fee of £140 with a £60 advance. In fact Coleridge eventually delivered twenty lectures, largely postponed to the spring season from 30 March to 30 May, and these De Quincey did not attend. The disaster lay at the beginning, as was perhaps inevitable, for Coleridge had to establish a form of public address which was appropriate to his gifts.
Coleridge treated the management with great respect and always tried to warn them of impending disruptions to his series through illness. At least one unpublished letter survives in the Institution’s archives, informing the Secretary of his imminent collapse in February – being “unable to stand in a public room” and “most cheerfully” offering to pay for the cost of informing subscribers and advertising the postponement. He also obtained a proper medical opinion of his state. “I have sent for [Dr] Abernethie, & shall learn from him whether this be only an interruption or a final farewell. Either myself or my medical attendant will write to Mr Bernard.”28 A first advance of £40 was given in late February, with an addition of £20 in late April. But the outstanding balance was not settled for over a year, and it was reduced at Coleridge’s own suggestion to a further £60.29
Coleridge’s collapse into opium at the outset of his lectures suggests that the strain and anxiety of performing in public was much greater than any of his friends had supposed. As he was already famed for his private talk, and had youthful experience of lecturing and preaching in Bristol in the 1790s, Davy and Bernard imagined he would quickly find his feet in front of the Royal Institution audience. But this was not the case. The Royal Institution was not a provincial meeting hall: its large mixed audience from the City and the West End was fashionable, sophisticated and easily bored. Tickets were expensive, expectations were high, and the Institution management required a fully written text to be declaimed in a formal manner.
Coleridge was alarmed by these requirements, which inhibited his natural lecture style. Far from being unprepared, his notes (for years scattered in the British Library and the New York Public Library) show that he had written out his texts for the two early lectures in numbing detail. He had chosen to begin with relatively conventional eighteenth-century theoretical topics: the aesthetics of Taste and the theory of Imitation, with a complex background of reading in Johnson, Blair, Herder, Dennis, Schlegel and Erasmus Darwin.30 The first lecture, for example, included a 2,000-word citation from Richard Payne Knight’s An Analytical Enquiry into the Principles of Taste (1806), which evidently exhausted both lecturer and audience.
Coleridge only slowly realized he needed to be much more innovative and intimate – to be much more himself. Herein lay the terror of self-exposure which took him weeks to surmount. He needed in effect to create a new style of lecturing, dramatic and largely extempore, which took risks, changed moods, digressed and doubled back, and played with his own eccentricities. He needed, above all, to enact the imaginative process of the poet in his own person, to demonstrate a poet at work in the laboratory of his ideas.
Coleridge’s efforts to face up to the demands of his lectures cost him almost two months of continuous illness and opium excess. From the middle of February till the end of March 1808 his life was suspended, much as it had been at Keswick in the terrible winter of 1801. His stomach problems were so severe that he sometimes thought he would die, and he wildly added doses of hensbane, rhubarb and magnesia to his laudanum. In his worst moments he thought he had kidney stones or bladder cancer.31
His rooms at the Courier office, immediately above the printing press which started at four each morning, were thunderously noisy and chaotic.32 He stayed in bed most mornings, and was so disorganized he could not even muster a clean shirt for lecturing. On one occasion he started with six shirts, lost three in the laundry, found he had been sleeping in the fourth, and had inadvertently used the fifth as a floormat while washing. The sixth and last shirt, when he put it on, had no draw-strings to do up at the neck.33 His landlady, Mrs Brainbridge, was old and deaf and could not cope with his visitors. She turned away one, the distinguished painter John Landseer, with the explanation to Coleridge that he was “a sort of a Methody Preacher at that Unstitution, where you goes to spout, Sir”. Coleridge counted this as a rare compliment.34
Charles Lamb wrote to his friend Manning