Arriving in London at the beginning of September, Coleridge was too ashamed of his scruffy clothes to go to the coffee house where he had stayed in the past, so instead he lodged at the Angel Inn, down a lane off disreputable Newgate Street. Southey’s aristocratic friend Grosvenor Charles Bedford received him politely – even though his appearance was ‘so very anti-genteel’ – and was civil enough not to stare at the address Coleridge gave him. As expected, he was not enthusiastic about Pantisocracy. A couple of days later Coleridge was introduced over breakfast to George Dyer, an eccentric middle-aged Unitarian, author of Complaints of the Poor People of England, who had been a pupil at Christ’s Hospital and an undergraduate at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. By contrast with Bedford, Dyer was ‘enraptured’ with Pantisocracy, and pronounced it impregnable’. Coleridge told Southey complacently that Dyer was ‘intimate with’ Joseph Priestley (already settled on the Susquehanna), ‘and doubts not, that the Doctor will join us’. On being shown part of the verse drama ‘he liked it hugely’ and opined that it was a ‘Nail, that would drive’. Dyer offered to speak to Robinson, his ‘Bookseller’ (publisher), about it, and when Robinson proved to be away in the country, took it to two others, neither of whom seemed keen.1 After this depressing reaction Coleridge decided that he and Southey should publish the drama themselves, printing five hundred copies; ‘it will repay us amply’. It should be published under his name alone, he told Southey, because ‘it would appear ridiculous to put two names to such a Work’, and because his name would sell at least a hundred copies within Cambridge.2 The Fall of Robespierre duly appeared as the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge at Jesus College at the end of September.
For the next fortnight or so, Coleridge spent every evening at another ale house in Newgate Street, the Salutation and Cat, where he preached Pantisocracy to two former Christ’s Hospital schoolboys, both nineteen, Samuel Le Grice (younger brother of Coleridge’s contemporary Valentine) and Samuel Favell. The three Sams made a comfortable party, talking and drinking porter and punch around a good fire. They were joined by another former Christ’s Hospital pupil, who remembered Coleridge kindly, a young man who had spent the last five years in America. He advised that they could buy land a great deal cheaper over there, Coleridge informed Southey, and that ‘twelve men may easily clear three hundred Acres in 4 or 5 months’; that the Susquehanna valley was to be recommended for its ‘excessive Beauty, and it’s security from hostile Indians’; that ‘literary Characters make money there’; that ‘he never saw a Byson in his Life – but has heard of them’; that ‘the Musquitos are not so bad as our Gnats – and after you have been there a little while, they don’t trouble you much’.3 Altogether this was very encouraging.
Coleridge returned to Cambridge later than he had intended, to find that the undergraduates he had encountered on the road during his tour of Wales had ‘spread my Opinions in mangled forms’. He soon set them right. There was some interest in Pantisocracy within the university, and some amusement too; Coleridge was a colourful character. But his eloquence trounced all opposition; within a month of his return, he boasted, Pantisocracy was the ‘universal Topic’ there. Meanwhile – notwithstanding his understanding with Sara Fricker – he flirted with Ann, sister of the celebrated actress Elizabeth Brunton and daughter of John Brunton, actor-manager of a company based in Norwich. He dedicated to her a poem on the French Revolution which he inscribed in a presentation copy of The Fall of Robespierre. He planned to visit the Bruntons in Norwich in the New Year. ‘The young lady is said to be the most literary of the beautiful, and the most beautiful of the literatae,’ he wrote provocatively to Southey – while almost in the same breath defending himself against the charge that he had written too seldom to Sara.
Southey had been having a difficult time. Once Coleridge had left, it seemed that ‘all the prejudices of the human heart are in arms against me’. Neither his fiancée nor his mother was keen to leave England. His rich aunt turned him out of the house one wet night when she discovered his plan to emigrate from her servant Shadrach Weeks, whom Coleridge had recruited to Pantisocracy. She was equally disapproving of his plan to marry Edith Fricker, a milliner. Though Southey (parroting Godwin) preached disregarding ‘individual feelings’ – towards one’s mother or future wife, for example – he found this principle hard to practise. To Coleridge, Southey appeared to be backsliding, now saying that some of the emigrants might continue as servants, thereby freeing others of domestic chores. ‘Let them dine with us and be treated with as much equality as they would wish – but perform that part of Labor for which their Education has fitted them,’ he advocated. ‘Southey should not have written this Sentence,’ insisted Coleridge, who suspected that his friend’s resolve was being undermined by the women in the party.4
But while Coleridge strove to keep Southey to the founding principles of Pantisocracy, Southey chided him for neglecting Sara Fricker. Each sought the moral high ground. Southey was painfully aware that he had forfeited his aunt’s favour, at least partly for Edith’s sake. In self-righteous mood, he was intolerant of Coleridge’s vacillating commitment to Sara. It is possible that Southey was under pressure from Edith to argue her sister’s case with his friend. But it seems likely too that Southey was genuinely concerned about Sara. There is some evidence that he had been interested in her himself, before turning his attentions towards her more placid younger sister. In later life he continued to be solicitous for her welfare. Moreover, in encouraging Coleridge’s relationship with Sara, he was binding Coleridge closer to himself – ‘I shall then call Coleridge my brother in the real sense of the word.’5 Conversely, Coleridge encouraged Southey’s relationship with Edith. ‘I am longing to be with you,’ he wrote to Southey on his first morning in Cambridge: ‘Make Edith my Sister – Surely, Southey! We shall be frendotatoi meta frendous. Most friendly where all are friends. She must therefore be more emphatically my Sister.’ In this overwrought dialogue, each man was goading the other to commit – to the woman certainly, but also to Pantisocracy, perhaps also to himself. For Coleridge, all three were bound up with each other: ‘America! Southey! Miss Fricker!’ He convinced himself that he was in love with her: ‘Yes – Southey – you are right – Even Love is the creature of strong Motive – I certainly love her.’6 Yet a week later he described himself as ‘labouring under a waking Night-Mair of Spirits’7 – not the expected state of mind for a young man in love. In the first letter he wrote to Sara from Cambridge, his own eloquence betrayed him into expressing emotions he did not fully feel. He later described this as ‘the most criminal action of my Life … I had worked myself to such a pitch, that I scarcely knew I was writing like an hypocrite.’ When it was too late, he recognised that he had ‘mistaken the ebullience of schematism for affection, which a moment’s reflection might have told me, is not a plant of so mushroom a growth’.8
‘God forbid!’ replied Southey, ‘that the Ebullience of Schematism should be over. It is the Promethean Fire that animates my soul – and when that is gone, all will be darkness! I have DEVOTED myself! –’9
The night he arrived back in Cambridge, Coleridge wrote a strange, emotional letter to Edith, recalling his own dead sister Nancy.
I had a Sister – an only Sister. Most tenderly did I love her! Yea, I have woke at midnight, and wept – because she was not …
There is no attachment under heaven so pure, so endearing …