the Bridgwater Arms.’”93
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While staying at Thomas Chubb’s house, Coleridge was taking the afternoon air at the gate, when he was approached by a diminutive figure leading a large horse. The shy, elfin young man introduced himself as an unknown admirer who had pursued him from London, to Bristol, to Stowey, and thence to Bridgwater. This pilgrim was the 22-year-old Thomas De Quincey. He later claimed to have recognized Coleridge by the “peculiar haze or dreaminess” in his large, softly gazing eyes. “He was in a deep reverie; for I had dismounted, made two or three trifling arrangements at an inn door, and advanced close to him, before he had apparently become conscious of my presence.”94
After some difficulty in “recovering his position amongst daylight realities”, Coleridge turned all his “gracious” attentions on the young traveller, invited him in for drinks, sat him down, urged him to stay for dinner, and began talking about the difference between the philosophies of David Hartley and Immanuel Kant, and continued easily for three hours. De Quincey was simply dazzled, just as young Hazlitt had been ten years before on hearing him preach. His description, elaborated like Hazlitt’s many years after, shows Coleridge overwhelming the young Oxford student (De Quincey was in his third year at Worcester College) like an irresistible force of nature. The dinner arrangement being settled, “Coleridge, like some great river, the Oreallana or the St Lawrence, that, having been checked and fretted by rocks or thwarting islands, suddenly recovers its volume of waters and its mighty music swept at once, as if returning to his natural business, into a continuous strain of eloquent dissertation, certainly the most novel, the most finely illustrated, and traversing the most spacious fields of thought by transitions the most just and logical, that it was possible to conceive.”
This display continued until abruptly interrupted by a woman’s entrance. “Coleridge paused…in a frigid tone he said, while turning to me, ‘Mrs Coleridge’; in some slight way he then presented me to her: I bowed; and the lady almost immediately retired. I gathered, what I afterwards learned redundantly, that Coleridge’s marriage had not been a happy one.”95
Even more than Hazlitt, De Quincey was to find his whole literary life shaped and directed by the consequences of this memorable first encounter. It led to his introduction into the Lake District circle that autumn (he had previously corresponded with Wordsworth, but had never dared to meet him); it confirmed his lifelong fascination with German philosophy and psychological criticism; and it gave him courage to explore his great autobiographical theme – opium addiction. His Confessions of an English Opium Eater made his name as a writer when published in 1821, and all his subsequent journalism was signed “The English Opium Eater”. De Quincey made the subject fashionable, and his work was translated in France by Alfred de Musset. Thirty years of subsequent commentaries on and additions to the Confessions are inextricably involved with Coleridge’s private experiences and may be taken as a lengthy (and often barbed) tribute to the older man and pioneer addict. Coleridge continuously haunts De Quincey’s pages, as a sort of battered Virgilian guide to the opium Inferno.
At the time of meeting Coleridge in Chubb’s gateway, De Quincey was still an aimless, Romantic young gentleman-vagabond very typical of his post-revolutionary university generation. He had no ambitions in business, science, church or politics. Brought up and spoiled by a widowed mother, educated at Manchester Grammar School (from which he ran away), he had spent his summer vacations living rough in Wales and experimenting with opium in London. Here he had his famous encounter with the teenage prostitute, “Anne of Oxford Street”.
This formative affair, and his sexual fantasies of the embracing exotic woman “Levana” (one of the three “Our Ladies of Sorrows” who dominate the Confessions’ great dream-sequences) he would later assign to the summers of 1802–4. Yet they suggest curious parallels with what De Quincey later learned of Coleridge’s Asra obsession, and they may have been retrospectively shaped and coloured.
That summer of 1807 he had abandoned university, like Coleridge before him, without taking his final degree, and had determined on introducing himself to the authors of the Lyrical Ballads. He regarded them as the intellectual and spiritual authorities of their age. Brilliantly clever, but emotionally damaged and dependent (not least by his tiny size, which painfully recalls Hartley Coleridge), De Quincey was like some darting, changeling child seeking giant parents to worship and quarrel with. Over the next ten years (when he would settle at Grasmere and play almost daily with the children) Wordsworth would be his father and mentor. But Coleridge, the great river-god of words and opium, would be something more dangerous and elemental, a demonic elder brother or doppelgänger, easier to understand and far easier to despise.
De Quincey would claim that at Bridgwater Coleridge almost immediately brought up the subject of addiction: “for already he was under the full dominion of opium, as he himself revealed to me, and with a deep expression of horror at the hideous bondage, in a private walk of some length which I took with him about sunset.”96
This, like many of De Quincey’s colourful reconstructions (which he first published in Tait’s Magazine in the year of Coleridge’s death), has been largely doubted. But it seems quite possible, given the confessional tone of Coleridge’s Notebooks at Coleorton and Stowey, and the openness with which he increasingly talked to the younger generation, far less censorious than his own contemporaries. Certainly, after his return to Bristol, De Quincey soon put in hand two schemes which were of immense practical aid to Coleridge. The first was to use £500 of his family inheritance as an “anonymous” long-term loan to Coleridge through Joseph Cottle. The second was to offer himself in Coleridge’s stead as an escort to Mrs Coleridge and the children when they eventually returned, as now planned, to Keswick.
In retrospect one might accuse De Quincey of “buying” his way into the Lake District circle. Yet he was only twenty-two, and the awed tone of his letters at this date (especially to Wordsworth) suggest genuine and idealistic hero-worship. He spoke of himself as one “who bends the knee” before them. “And I will add that, to no man on earth except yourself,” he wrote to Wordsworth, “and one other (a friend of yours), would I thus lowly and suppliantly prostrate myself.”97 After that first meeting at Bridgwater, De Quincey rode back the same night to Bristol, forty miles along the turnpike road under the stars, thinking rapturously of “the greatest man that has ever appeared”.98
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By August, Coleridge was blessedly alone with Poole at Stowey, and a note of bucolic and unaccustomed content crept into his difficult convalescence. “The Hayfield in the close hard by the Farm House: babe, and totterer little more; old cat with her eyes blinking in the Sun, & little kittens leaping and frisking over the Hay-lines.”99
Coleridge made long notes on the planting of oak trees for the new generation, on the cultivation of sunflowers, and the predicting of weather. He walked with Poole to see the Cruikshanks at Enmore, to see Brice at Aisholt, and the fishermen at Combwich. He dined with Lord Egremont, and drank mead all night with Brice, explaining that “the second bottle became associated with the idea, & afterwards with the body, of S.T.C. – by necessity of metaphysical Law”.100
He attended the opening of the Female Friendly Society of Stowey (another of Poole’s philanthropic foundations, like the Stowey Bank) and unblushingly supplied the
