7
In reality, for little Sam the bells brought scant release. Because of his small size and difficult temperament, he was kept on at dame-school until the age of six – not to be “trusted among my Father’s School-boys”.18 By then his elder brothers, tall distant figures, were going out into the world. William left Wadham College, Oxford, and became a schoolmaster in Hackney, aged twenty-three. James – a stocky, red-faced, resolute young man – left Ottery aged sixteen, with ten guineas sewn into the back of his waistcoat, to join the ranks of the 6th Regiment of Foot; then Edward, “the Wit of the family”, left for Pembroke, Oxford.19 Coleridge significantly put down these departures to his mother’s influence in family affairs. She was, he said dispassionately, “an admirable Economist, and managed exclusively”.20 “My Father…had so little of parental ambition in him, that he had destined his children to be Blacksmiths etc, & had accomplished his intention but for my Mother’s pride & spirit of aggrandizing her family.”21
This was almost certainly untrue of the Reverend John, whose whole career showed a headmaster’s natural drive for distinction. His academic successes were renowned throughout the county. But Coleridge’s feelings for his mother were to become ambiguous, and finally bitter. By comparison his father – his lost, beloved father – was to be transformed into a humorous paragon of gentleness and understanding, utterly without worldly ambitions.
During these difficult childhood years, after being the “darling” who sat, as he fondly recalled, “at my mother’s side, on my little stool, to read my little book, and to listen to the talk of my elders”, he clearly felt he became at first an anxiety, and then a disappointment, to her.22 He felt this rejection as deeply as anything in his life, and at sixteen would say of the mother of a schoolfriend in London that she “taught me what it was to have a mother”.23 In later life, he often repeated this sense of looking for mother-substitutes. At twenty-nine, he told his friend Tom Poole that Mrs Poole “was the only Being whom I ever felt in the relation of Mother”.24 In middle age the search for a lost mother continued, with strange consequences.25
Exactly how this process of alienation occurred is difficult to say, for Coleridge wrote and talked more and more about his father, and less and less about his mother as he grew older. But he seems to have felt, very early on, that in her eyes by comparison with his brothers, he was already a failure by the time he left Ottery. There are no contemporary accounts of mother and son together in these early days. But some years later, when he revisited Ottery in the autumn of 1799, there was a revealing incident which was recorded by his friend, Robert Southey. “We were all a good deal amused by the old lady,” – Ann Coleridge, aged seventy-two, was by then rather deaf – “she could not hear what was going on, but seeing Samuel arguing with his brothers, took it for granted that he must have been in the wrong, and cried out, ‘Ah, if your poor father had been alive, he’d soon have convinced you.’”26
It was amusing to Southey, but not to Coleridge. In his poetry it was to produce the recurring image of a lost or rejected child, for ever attempting to return home, or recover the feelings of home, or somehow – marvellously – to reinvent them.
The pluck and determination of his older brothers was exemplified by John, who had been in Calcutta since 1771, and within five years rose to the rank of lieutenant. His courage and generosity became legendary in the family. His vivid, good-hearted letters arrived regularly at Ottery throughout Coleridge’s boyhood, often bringing money. They could hardly have failed to fire Sam’s imagination. In 1775 a typical missive arrived from Monghyr, on the Ganges, a hundred miles south of the Nepalese border.
I left Calcutta about the end of April…You have no doubt heard of Monghyr, famous for its wild, romantic situation, and especially for its being the Montpellier of the East. About two miles from the garrison there is a Hotwell in which the water continually boils; the Natives esteem it sacred, and flock thither from all parts of the country to receive a Holy Sprinkling, as they imagine it has the Virtue of cleansing them from their sins…27
It may have been glimpses like this that first turned Coleridge towards his lifelong fascination with travel books. James came to rely on John for help in his own military career, eventually receiving from him the sum of £1,000 to purchase a commission. Francis so worshipped John that he finally contrived to join him in India at the incredibly early age of twelve. John even had a remarkable plan for Sam to join him in India as a cadet; but this was to be forestalled by his own tragic death from malaria, at Tillicherry, in January 1787. He died penniless, having sent all his money home or lent it to fellow officers.28
8
By the age of six, Sam’s obsessive reading had reached unhealthy proportions. Coleridge again described this with a keen eye on the young prodigy in the making. He had imported “all the gilt-covered little books” from his aunt’s every-thing shop at Crediton, and among them The Arabian Nights:
one tale of which (the tale of a man who was compelled to seek for a pure virgin) made so deep an impression on me (I had read it in the evening while my mother was mending stockings) that I was haunted by spectres, whenever I was in the dark – and I distinctly remember the anxious & fearful eagerness, with which I used to watch the window, in which the books lay – & whenever the Sun lay upon them, I would seize it, carry it by the wall, & bask, & read.29
The childish mixture of fantasy and superstition is acutely recalled: the beautiful virgin who is also a fearful spectre; the relentless moving finger of the sun which is also a kind of benevolent, protecting power. Again, these are themes that Coleridge would carry into his adult poetry of his late twenties, in “Christabel” and the Ancient Mariner.
In his forties he was still recalling the impact of The Arabian Nights in his essays: “…I can never forget with what a strange mixture of obscure dread and intense desire I used to look at the volume and watch it, till the morning sunshine had reached and nearly covered it, when, and not before, I felt the courage given me to seize the precious treasure…”30
Coleridge also saw himself as little Sam, becoming almost comically peculiar and precocious. “So I became a dreamer – and acquired an indisposition to all bodily activity – and I was fretful, and inordinately passionate, and as I could not play at any thing, and was slothful, I was despised & hated by the boys; and because I could read & spell, & had, I may truly say, a memory & understanding forced into almost an unnatural ripeness, I was flattered & wondered at by all the old women.”31 Here, incidentally, is the first glimpse of Coleridge the talker, ensconced in a circle of his clucking admirers. (He later told Godwin that he was “accustomed only to the conversation of grown persons”, and became “arrogant & conceited”.)32
The Reverend John now intervened. With characteristic