At the end of this year, on the death of the incumbent, the Reverend Richard Holmes MA (a man who has left no significant trace), John Coleridge was also appointed vicar of St Mary’s, thus establishing himself as one of the leading figures in the town. His rapidly growing family soon occupied both the School House (where there were a dozen or so private pupils) and the Vicarage. These were situated in the cluster of old medieval buildings below the church in a commanding position on the top of the Cornhill of Ottery St Mary’s. There is a surviving eighteenth-century aquatint showing the Vicarage, divided from the churchyard by a sunken lane. Here a stout, old-fashioned gentleman in clerical knee-breeches and broad-brimmed hat is mounting a horse. This is the Reverend John preparing for a pastoral visit.
Next door, Sir Stafford Northcote kept his town residence in the Warden House; and at the end of the sunken lane stood Chanter’s House in extensive grounds, eventually to become the family home of the most successful of the tribe. By the time of little Sam’s birth in 1772, the three surviving half-sisters (“my aunts”) were married and living away; and the eldest boy, John, then aged eighteen, had already departed as a soldier to India. The remaining family at Ottery consisted of William, then sixteen, who would prove a scholar; James, thirteen, who would become a successful career soldier in England; Edward, twelve, destined to become a clergyman and “the wit” of the family; George, eight, who would become a headmaster like his father; Luke, seven, who would train as a doctor; Anne, five, universally loved and affectionately known as “Nancy” by all her brothers; and Francis, two, the most handsome and dashing of the boys, who would also go to India. “All my Brothers are remarkably handsome,” observed Coleridge mournfully, “but they were as inferior to Francis as I am to them.”12 This question of “inferiority” was to be a recurring anxiety of the youngest, uncertain whether he was the Benjamin or the black sheep.
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On his own evidence, Coleridge emerged cuckoo-like from his nursery in the School House, greedy, precocious, and temperamental. His appetite for food and books appeared almost indistinguishable, expressed by an almost alarmingly large mouth which hung permanently open because he found difficulty in breathing through his nose. By the age of three he could read a chapter of the Bible, and was attending the local dame-school, which he largely remembered for the “three cakes” he was allowed to buy at the baker’s shop on the way. At home he “wallowed in a beef & pudding dinner”, and devoured adventure stories: “Jack the Giant Killer”, Robinson Crusoe, “General Belisaurius”, and the strange tale of Philip Quarll, The English Hermit. This told of “the Sufferings and Surprising Adventures of Mr Philip Quarll, who was lately discovered by Mr Dorrington, a Bristol Merchant, upon an uninhabited island in the South Sea; where he has lived above Fifty Years, without any human Assistance, still continues to reside, and will not come away.” One of Quarll’s adventures was the shooting of a large and beautiful sea-bird with a home-made bow, an action he immediately regrets: “I have destroyed that as was certainly made for Nature’s Diversion with such a Variety of Colours…”13
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He was petted by his sister Nancy, who used to sing him melancholy ballads on winter evenings:
Ballad of ship-wreck’d sailor floating dead, Whom his own true-love buried in the sands!14
But he was teased by the older schoolboys, and sibling rivalry soon surfaced with his daring, extrovert brother Francis. There were angry disputes for the affection of his nurse, Molly, an old family retainer, much loved by all the other boys. In the autobiographical letters written at Nether Stowey in his twenties,* Coleridge analysed this with his customary psychological acuity, finding in it the beginnings of his inner imaginative life, a child escaping into his fantasy world.
Molly, who had nursed my Brother Francis, and was immoderately fond of him, hated me because my mother took more notice of me than of Frank – and Frank hated me, because my mother gave me now & then a bit of cake, when he had none…So I became fretful, & timorous, & a tell-tale – & the School-boys drove me from play, & were always tormenting me – & hence I took no pleasure in boyish sports – but read incessantly…And I used to lie by the wall, and mope – and my spirits used to come upon me suddenly, & in a flood – & then I was accustomed to run up and down the church-yard, and act over all I had been reading on the docks, the nettles, and the rank-grass.15
The church and churchyard of St Mary Ottery, immediately outside the School House across the sunken lane, became a magic world to little Sam amidst these persecutions, mopings and tantrums. He would later strongly identify with another persecuted poet, Thomas Chatterton, who created his own imaginary world in St Mary’s Redcliffe church, at Bristol.
St Mary Ottery was an evocative place, a fourteenth-century foundation modelled by Bishop Grandisson on Exeter Cathedral, a collegiate building much larger than an ordinary parish church. It dominated the Cornhill and the entire town, with two huge granite bell-towers whose peals could be heard throughout the valley of the Otter.
Outside, the old gravestones stood at angles in the sunlight. Inside were many shadowy wonders: corbells in the shape of owls and elephants, a globe mounted with an heraldic eagle, and the medieval tombs of the Grandisson family. On one side of the nave, low enough for a child to climb on, was the tomb of the crusader, Sir Otho de Grandisson (died 1359), in helmet and chain-mail, holding his broadsword; on the other, that of his wife Lady Beatrix (died 1374), with her dogs at her feet.
In the gallery of the south transept hung Bishop Grandisson’s enormous mechanical clock, with its square wooden face painted bright blue. It showed the time with an intriguing system of planetary symbols, based on the Ptolemaic model, with a golden sun, and silver moon, and a gilded star, moving steadily round the gleaming dial of heaven. Such images sank deeply into the child’s mind, unconsciously reappearing in the great ballads written twenty years after.
The moving Moon went up the sky
And nowhere did abide:
Softly she was going up,
And a Star or two beside.16
In his autobiographic poetry Coleridge transformed his unhappy memories into an idyllic Romantic version of his “native home”. In “Frost at Midnight”, written in 1797, the bells of St Mary’s are given a thrilling, other-worldly quality, far removed from his playground miseries. The endless carillons of feast-days and fair-days, when the chimes were rung for twelve hours at a stretch, are made to promise a dream-like expansion into future happiness. He was here describing his memories as a teenage schoolboy in London, long after the “exile” from Ottery had occurred, and the poetic myth of his childhood was already being prepared for his own son, Hartley.
With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt
Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,
Whose bells, the poor man’s only music, rang
From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,
So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me
With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear
Most like articulate sounds of things to come!17