Coleridge: Early Visions. Richard Holmes

as an exceptional creature, both intellectually brilliant and morally unstable. He was to make it one of the archetypes of Romantic childhood. This is the picture he presented to his brother George, a sober clergyman, in a poem written at the age of twenty-five:

      Me from the spot where first I sprang to light

      Too soon transplanted, ere my soul had fix’d

      Its first domestic loves; and hence through life

      Chasing chance-started friendships.¹

      Thirty years later, at the age of fifty-five, talking to his physician and confidant, the surgeon James Gillman, he expressed the same feelings, though now raised into the sonorous prose of his late manner. “When I was first plucked up and transplanted from my birthplace and family, at the death of my dear father, whose revered image has ever survived in my mind…Providence (it has often occurred to me) gave the first intimation, that it was my lot, and that it was best for me, to make or find my way of life a detached individual, a Terrae Filius…”² He was to be a solitary voyager, an archetypal “son of the Earth”, an orphan of the storm, flung out to wander over the world in search of visions. Or so, most wonderfully, he said.

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      Samuel Taylor Coleridge first “sprang to light” in the vicarage of the small market-town of Ottery St Mary in Devon, one autumn morning on 21 October 1772. He was the youngest often children, an unexpected fruit of late vintage; his father, the vicar, was already fifty-three years old and his mother forty-five. They both adored him – a large, fat, greedy baby with a shock of unruly black hair, and huge grey astonishing eyes. “My Father was very fond of me, and I was my mother’s darling – in consequence, I was very miserable.”³

      He was christened after his godfather, a local worthy, Mr Samuel Taylor, and always known in the family as “Sam”, a name he grew to dislike with poignant intensity. Like many a youngest child he was petted and indulged, and almost his earliest memory was of being specially carried out by his nurse to hear a strolling musician playing ballads in the moonlight, during the harvest festivities.

      To hear our old Musician, blind and grey,

      (Whom stretching from my nurse’s arms I kissed,)

      His Scottish tunes and warlike marches play,

      By moonshine, on the balmy summer-night…⁴

      Nursery tradition told of his waywardness and inquisitive mischief. When “carelessly” left by his nurse, he crawled to the fire and pulled out a live coal, badly burning his hand; a Promethean incident also fondly recalled in his poem “To an Infant” (1795). When, at the age of two, he came to be inoculated, he howled when the doctors tried to cover his eyes. It was not the pain, but the concealment of the mystery which upset him. “I manifested so much obstinate indignation, that at last they removed the bandage – and unaffrighted I looked at the lancet & suffered the scratch.”⁵ He was to do something like that for the rest of his life.

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      The large West Country family in which he grew up was in many ways a remarkable one. Eight of them were boys (one died in infancy), and all showed talent either for soldiering or scholarship. Their father, the Reverend John Coleridge, was not only vicar of Ottery, but also headmaster of the local King’s Grammar School, a man who inspired them with notions of duty and excellence which had a profound effect on their upbringing. He referred to them, with Old Testament pride, as his “tribe”. All the boys were securely launched in their careers at the time of his sudden death in 1781, except for little Sam who was not quite nine. The effects of this early bereavement were to run very deep for the youngest child.

      In origin the Coleridges were a stalwart and undistinguished Devon clan of yeoman farmers and small traders, from three parishes west of Exeter, which themselves sound like some sort of folksong – Dunsford, Drewsteignton, and Doddiscombsleigh.⁶ If they were renowned for anything, it was for fertility. Coleridge used to say that his grandfather was a bastard brought up by the parish, and apprenticed as a woollen-draper in Crediton, where he only briefly deviated into respectability. If there was ever a sans-culotte revolution, he could safely deny “one drop of Gentility”.⁷

      Another tale he told, emphasised eccentricity. “His grandfather, a weaver, half-poet and half-madman…used to ask the passing beggar to dinner in Oriental phrase, ‘Will my lord turn in hither, and eat with his servant?’ – and washed his feet.”⁸

      Nevertheless, his father, the Reverend John Coleridge, was an example of the historic rise of an English middle-class family in three generations; and his grandchildren were to be a successful race of judges, bishops, and senior academics. This pressure for family success, closely associated with Sam’s elder brothers, was to have a subtle and pervasive influence throughout Coleridge’s literary life – a profession where “success” and respectability are delusive concepts.

      The Reverend John Coleridge was born in Crediton, north of Exeter, in January 1719. He obtained an exhibition to the local grammar school, and would have gone on directly to university but for the bankruptcy of his father, the woollen-draper. The reasons for this downfall are unknown, but there is some suggestion of heavy drinking, which can often be a family inheritance. Coleridge liked to believe that John was a dreamy and unworldly man – “a perfect Parson Adams” in an oft-repeated phrase – and would tell comic anecdotes of his father’s scholarly distraction, in long evening sessions with Gillman at Highgate, “till the tears ran down his face”.⁹ This may have been so in later life, but there is a characteristic element of myth-making in Coleridge’s accounts of John’s saintly simplicities. As a young man he seems to have been determined and ambitious, riding rough-shod over his various setbacks. Temporarily cheated of university, he took a schoolmastership at the nearby village of Clysthdon, married a local Crediton girl, by whom he had four daughters, and continued to study hard and somehow to save money. In 1747, at the age of twenty-eight, he was able to apply for matriculation as a mature student at Sidney Sussex, Cambridge – a triumph over his straitened circumstances.

      Here he proved himself a brilliant student of classics and Hebrew, so that by 1749 he had qualified for his first major appointment as headmaster of Squire’s Latin School at South Molton, and also obtained the curacy of nearby Mariansleigh. On the death of his first wife in 1751, he did not repine but promptly married Ann Bowdon, the handsome and capable daughter of an Exmoor farmer, who had all the ambition and drive of a perfect headmaster’s wife.

      He also began to publish – first as an “ingenious contributor” to the Gentleman’s Magazine: and then as an author of scholarly text-books. There followed a series of worthy productions: a Hebrew edition of the Bible (co-edited); a short grammatical textbook for schools (1759); a Dissertation on the Book of Judges (1768); and a Critical Latin Grammar (1772). In 1776, he privately printed his own political statement, A Fast Sermon, deploring the outbreak of the American War of Independence, in which he rather pithily observed that “you might as well imagine the Almighty to create the Sun, Moon, and Stars, and then permit them to move at random, as to create Man, and not ordain Government.” One may gather from this that John Coleridge was no Anglican radical. His literary turn even reached the stage, for he adapted a Latin comedy by Terence, which he sent to Garrick at Drury Lane, under the rather tantalising title of The Fair Barbarian.10

      Coleridge gently deflated his father’s achievements – “the truth is, my Father was not a first-rate Genius – he was however a first-rate Christian”. He suggested that his greatest