was immediately able to pay off his debts to Wordsworth and Sotheby, and for the first time since returning from Italy to look with some calm at his future finances. He was immensely grateful, especially as Cottle had led him to believe that the benefactor was a man of suitable wealth and standing, not an undergraduate mortgaging his prospects. “I must tell you,” Cottle assured him, “that there is not a man in the Kingdom of whom you would rather accept a favour…”12 De Quincey meanwhile delivered Mrs Coleridge to Keswick, and became an immediate favourite with Hartley, Derwent and the Wordsworth children.
The other reason for delay was medical. Coleridge was again suffering from chronic stomach problems – the symptoms, “acrimony in the bowels”, sounds like Irritable Bowel Syndrome brought on by a mixture of stress and opium-taking. On 13 October he walked over to Clifton to consult Dr Beddoes. However, he still did not have the courage to make the full confession of his addiction, as he had determined with Poole at Stowey. The following February he was still resolving “instantly to put myself under Dr Beddoes, & to open to him the whole of my case”.13
In late October, on the very eve of departure, he was taken violently ill with vomiting and diarrhoea, while dining out with friends. “I was therefore a prisoner to the House, which was luckily Mr Morgan’s; where had I been a child or favourite Brother, I could not have received more affectionate attentions and indulgences.”14 Coleridge took up residence on the Morgans’ spare sofa for the next four weeks, where he was deliciously nursed and cosseted. No one outside Bristol – Poole, Davy, Mrs Coleridge, or Wordsworth – heard from him until the end of November.
2
Coleridge’s abrupt disappearance into the bosom of the Morgan household in autumn 1807 was as significant as his descent upon the Wordsworths at Grasmere in 1800. He had discovered a new adoptive family, and all his cuckoo-like propensities were at once aroused. John Morgan was a Bristol lawyer in his early thirties, a one-time pupil of Christ’s Hospital, and a friend of Charles Lamb’s. After practising briefly in the City of London (he seems to have worked at the Blackfriars office of Coleridge’s life assurance company), he had recently married a Miss Mary Brent, the wealthy daughter of a Hatton Garden silversmith. Together the young couple had moved back to an elegant house in St James’s Square, Bristol, where they were joined by Mary’s very attractive younger sister, Charlotte Brent.
The family was vivacious, fun-loving and, as events were to show, improvident. They were also childless, and had much time for books, theatre and pets (one of their favourites being a dog called “Vision”). John Morgan was a sensitive and intelligent man, having been brought up as a Unitarian, and frequently subject to relapses into religious gloom, which Coleridge was able to alleviate. He was to write of Coleridge’s first, momentous residence: “Amongst other obligations to you I feel strongly that of making me able to defend at least in my own mind the Orthodox religion against the Unitarian philosophy.”15
In return, Morgan had an unshakable admiration for Coleridge’s literary gifts, a deep sympathy for his marital predicament, and an unusual understanding of his opium addiction which seems to have been revealed from the outset of their friendship. Less organizing than Tom Poole, less censorious than George Coleridge, and far less demanding than Wordsworth, John Morgan slipped unconsciously into the role of Coleridge’s ideal and long-sought brother. Loyal, generous and naive, he became Coleridge’s unfailing anchorpoint in the dark years ahead.
Morgan’s naivety extended from financial to emotional matters. It was never clear quite how far he realized the extraordinary mirror-image that Coleridge projected on to his triangular household. John, Mary and Charlotte became youthful substitutes for Wordsworth, Mary and Asra; and Coleridge orchestrated them into this sentimental pattern with alarming rapidity. When he eventually arrived in London, he wrote immediately to Dorothy Wordsworth of this fateful revelation, sounding both excited and guilty. “I never knew two pairs of human beings so alike, as Mrs Morgan & her Sister, Charlotte Brent, and Mary and Sara. I was reminded afresh of the resemblance every hour – & at times felt a self-reproach, that I could not love two such amiable, pure & affectionate Beings for their own sakes. But there is a time in Life, when the Heart stops growing.”16
But Coleridge’s heart, and his fantasies, were actually in a most active state. He had started a poem on the subject, and he was already recalling a host of tender moments at St James’s Square: gifts, keepsakes, pet-names and shared jokes. In his mirror-universe, even the famous sofa scene with Mary and Asra at Gallow Hill (the subject of his Keswick poem, “A Day-Dream”) had been re-enacted in Bristol. He would recall it fondly to Mary Morgan, as a token of their new-found intimacy: “that evening, when dear Morgan was asleep in the Parlour, and you and beloved Caroletta asleep at opposite Corners of the Sopha in the Drawing Room, of which I occupied the centre in a state of blessed half-consciousness, as a drowsy Guardian of your Slumbers…”17
3
Coleridge finally roused himself from these dreamy delights on 22 November, riding up on the night mail to London, sustained by a wing of chicken and a flask of rum laid in with his lecture papers. “If very, very affectionate thoughts, wishes, recollections, anticipations, can serve instead of Grace before & after meat, mine was a very religious Meal.”18 Daniel Stuart gave him a set of rooms above the Courier offices at No. 348, the Strand.
His mood was now buoyant. “My Lectures will be profitable – and I have rewritten my play [Osorio] – & about doubled the length of Christabel – 2 thirds are finished.” This latter claim, which seems so definite (especially when added to similar statements of progress at Coleorton) remains one of the great mysteries of Coleridge’s bibliography. No Part III of “Christabel” has ever been found among his papers, except for a possible eleven-line fragment, “The Knight’s Tomb”. Could it have been dreamt in an opium “reverie”, like the missing 250 lines of “Kubla Khan”? or could it – as Osorio so nearly was – have been lost in some “lumber-room” or newspaper wastebin? The possibilities are tantalizing.
The lectures were due to begin in a fortnight, after Davy’s were complete; but now it was Davy who fell dangerously ill after six weeks of brilliant but exhausting demonstrations, his “March of Glory” as Coleridge called it. (The illness was gaol fever, contracted while inspecting the ventilation problems at Newgate Prison.) The Literary Series was put back to January 1808, and Coleridge beguiled the time by taking Stuart back to Bristol to meet his new supporters, the Morgans, and by publishing his poem in their honour in the Courier.
The poem was entitled “To Two Sisters, A Wanderer’s Farewell”, and appeared on 10 December under the pen-name “Siesti” (an expressive amalgam of “STC” and “Siesta”). It is openly and even brazenly confessional, describing his longing “for some abiding place of love”, and the Morgans’ soothing tenderness as like the unexpected glow of winter sun “on unthaw’d ice”. It casts himself as a homeless exile, and comes very close to admitting the “poison” of his opium addiction:
Me disinherited in form and face
By nature, and mishap of outward grace;
Who, soul and body, through one guiltless fault
Waste daily with the poison of sad thought…19
