Coleridge: Early Visions. Richard Holmes

of the great cities, and by December Paine would be burnt in effigy even on the Cornhill at Cambridge; and Joseph Priestley be driven out of Birmingham by rioters, who set fire to his house.

      Coleridge was depressed by the narrow provincialism of his family circle, and later told George that this visitation to Devon “annihilated whatever tender ideas” he had treasured of the place. He found Edward vain and eccentric, indulging in “Punnomania, with which he at present foams”. While James was cold, a stickler for appearances, and much concerned with the Sidmouth Volunteers. Coleridge could only show them “the semblance of Affection – perhaps, by persevering in appearing, I at last shall learn to be, a Brother.”¹⁸ They in turn evidently found him difficult and demanding, and it is notable that his mother forbade him to drink wine at table, “not a ‘single drop’”.¹⁹

      His thoughts turned instead to Frank out in India; he wrote him an affectionate letter (which has not survived), and while walking nostalgically in the Ottery churchyard had a long talk about his “most wonderful prospects” with a relative of the Governor-General of India, who said he would recommend him. Coleridge noted, with a touch of the old rivalry, that his mother “positively drank in” such dreams of Frank’s advancement. He told George, rather defensively, that he was studying Cicero hard and was determined to fulfil the expectations he had created for himself at Cambridge: “God forbid that I should perish” – this from Homer’s Iliad – “without effort and without renown.” No one in England yet knew that Frank had already committed suicide at Seringapatam.²⁰

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      His second year at Jesus College was certainly an active one. Exams, university politics, drinking, debts, and a growing infatuation with Mary Evans, all swept him in a ceaseless whirlpool of pleasures and anxieties. Though later he would characteristically say: “I became a proverb to the University for Idleness.”²¹

      His academic targets were probably far too ambitious, particularly now that his mentor Middleton had left Pembroke (without obtaining the expected Fellowship). His fellow undergraduates at Jesus were largely taken up with the cause célèbre of their radical tutor William Frend, who was tried in the Senate for religious blasphemy. Coleridge became a chief organiser of the Frend faction,^* and by 1793 his rooms were a renowned centre both for political and literary discussions held long into the night.

      Val Le Grice’s brother, Charles (the inimitable Val had lost his Exhibition because of drunkenness, evidently a Grecian weakness), decorously recalled what were obviously rowdy and undecorous sessions with Coleridge in full flow. “What evenings I have spent in those rooms!…when Aeschylus, and Plato, and Thucydides were pushed aside, with a pile of lexicons etc, to discuss the pamphlets of the day. Ever and anon, a pamphlet issued from the pen of Burke. There was no need of having the book before us. Coleridge had read it in the morning, and in the evening he would repeat whole pages verbatim.”²²

      Vendettas were also pursued against the more conservative Jesus dons. Coleridge told Mary Evans of his taunting of Mr Newton their Mathematics Tutor, even to the point of harassing the tutor’s doctor who had been so unwise as to treat him for a fever that had conveniently prevented him lecturing: “six of his duteous pupils, myself as their General, sallied forth to the Apothecary’s house with a fixed determination to thrash him for having performed so speedy a cure – but luckily for himself the Rascal was not at home.”²³ Slogans such as “Frend and Liberty” were daubed on the college walls, and at the height of the agitation even burnt in gunpowder on the sacred turf of Trinity College quadrangle.

      Amidst these stirring events, and the increasingly exciting despatches from Paris, Coleridge sat for his exams and prizes. In December he was selected by Professor Porson as one of the seventeen undergraduates in the university to take the prestigious Craven Scholarship, and by January 1793 was in the last four finalists. “We circumnavigated the Encyclopaedia – so very severe an examination was never remembered.” In April he sat again for the annual Rustat Exams, and in June again competed for the Brown Medal – submitting a Greek Ode on Astronomy.

      His results were not undistinguished, though clearly his family were disappointed. The Rustat Scholarship was renewed, and he came second in the Brown Medal (the winner was Keate, subsequently Shelley’s headmaster at Eton, the notorious “Flogger” Keate). The Craven was given to the youngest finalist, Christopher Bethell, who later became Bishop of Bangor. But the Master of Jesus, Dr Pearce, was so pleased with Coleridge’s performance that he awarded him the college “Chapel Clerk’s Place”, which brought him a further £33 per annum towards his expenses. It also required Coleridge – for Pearce was a shrewd man – to attend chapel at least four mornings a week, no doubt intended as a check on his nocturnal activities.

      For several weeks after the effort of the Craven, he was confined to his rooms with an abscessed tooth, and wrote a teasing series of letters to Mary. One, enclosing a spirited imitation of Ossian’s poetry, concluded: “Are you asleep, my dear Mary? – I have administered rather a strong Dose of Opium –: however, if in the course of your Nap you should chance to dream, that – I am with the ardour/of fraternal friendship/Your affectionate S. T. Coleridge – you will never have dreamt a truer dream in all your born days.”²⁴

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      One thing that Coleridge did not tell Mary in his letters, or George, was of his involvement in William Frend’s trial before the University Vice-Chancellor throughout the month of May 1793. Frend had published a pamphlet, Peace and Union, which became famous in the university that spring. Not only did it attack Anglican doctrines of faith, it also criticised the British declaration of war against France, and argued that Prime Minister Pitt was deliberately oppressing the poor weavers of the Midlands with war taxation. Deist and republican in tone, it strongly appealed to undergraduates like Coleridge who were questioning their own Christian beliefs, and who were fascinated by the egalitarian ideas of the French Revolution. The charge was a serious one, “sedition and defamation of the Church of England”, and the case eventually went before the Court of King’s Bench in London, that autumn, where the proceedings were recorded in the State Trials for that year.²⁵

      The atmosphere at the university had become both politicised and polarised. Not only was Tom Paine burnt in effigy; several dissenting tradesmen in the town had their business premises wrecked and were forced, like Priestley, to emigrate. A Patriotic Declaration by 112 tavern-keepers promised to report any undergraduates to the local magistrates who showed “treasonable or seditious tendencies” in their pubs and inns “by public conversation or by public reading, or circulation of any books, pamphlets, or papers”.²⁶ The university authorities regarded Frend’s trial as crucial, and the Vice-Chancellor later wrote: “I don’t believe Pitt was ever aware of how much consequence the expulsion of Frend was: it was the ruin of the Jacobinical party as a University thing…”²⁷

      From 1793 to 1796 Coleridge would flirt with many of the ideas of the English Jacobins, as he later freely admitted in private correspondence. Yet he always denied it in his public statements after 1800, and censored his own lectures and newspaper articles accordingly when they were later republished – another clear example of his reconstructed autobiography. This flirtation began at Jesus when, as Charles Le Grice noted, Coleridge’s rooms became a centre of the Frend faction, and during the trial “pamphlets swarmed from the press. Coleridge had read them all; and in the evenings, with our negus, we had them viva voce gloriously.”²⁸