to pay for the cost of informing subscribers and advertising the postponement. He also obtained a proper medical opinion of his state. “I have sent for [Dr] Abernethie, & shall learn from him whether this be only an interruption or a final farewell. Either myself or my medical attendant will write to Mr Bernard.”28 A first advance of £40 was given in late February, with an addition of £20 in late April. But the outstanding balance was not settled for over a year, and it was reduced at Coleridge’s own suggestion to a further £60.29
Coleridge’s collapse into opium at the outset of his lectures suggests that the strain and anxiety of performing in public was much greater than any of his friends had supposed. As he was already famed for his private talk, and had youthful experience of lecturing and preaching in Bristol in the 1790s, Davy and Bernard imagined he would quickly find his feet in front of the Royal Institution audience. But this was not the case. The Royal Institution was not a provincial meeting hall: its large mixed audience from the City and the West End was fashionable, sophisticated and easily bored. Tickets were expensive, expectations were high, and the Institution management required a fully written text to be declaimed in a formal manner.
Coleridge was alarmed by these requirements, which inhibited his natural lecture style. Far from being unprepared, his notes (for years scattered in the British Library and the New York Public Library) show that he had written out his texts for the two early lectures in numbing detail. He had chosen to begin with relatively conventional eighteenth-century theoretical topics: the aesthetics of Taste and the theory of Imitation, with a complex background of reading in Johnson, Blair, Herder, Dennis, Schlegel and Erasmus Darwin.30 The first lecture, for example, included a 2,000-word citation from Richard Payne Knight’s An Analytical Enquiry into the Principles of Taste (1806), which evidently exhausted both lecturer and audience.
Coleridge only slowly realized he needed to be much more innovative and intimate – to be much more himself. Herein lay the terror of self-exposure which took him weeks to surmount. He needed in effect to create a new style of lecturing, dramatic and largely extempore, which took risks, changed moods, digressed and doubled back, and played with his own eccentricities. He needed, above all, to enact the imaginative process of the poet in his own person, to demonstrate a poet at work in the laboratory of his ideas.
Coleridge’s efforts to face up to the demands of his lectures cost him almost two months of continuous illness and opium excess. From the middle of February till the end of March 1808 his life was suspended, much as it had been at Keswick in the terrible winter of 1801. His stomach problems were so severe that he sometimes thought he would die, and he wildly added doses of hensbane, rhubarb and magnesia to his laudanum. In his worst moments he thought he had kidney stones or bladder cancer.31
His rooms at the Courier office, immediately above the printing press which started at four each morning, were thunderously noisy and chaotic.32 He stayed in bed most mornings, and was so disorganized he could not even muster a clean shirt for lecturing. On one occasion he started with six shirts, lost three in the laundry, found he had been sleeping in the fourth, and had inadvertently used the fifth as a floormat while washing. The sixth and last shirt, when he put it on, had no draw-strings to do up at the neck.33 His landlady, Mrs Brainbridge, was old and deaf and could not cope with his visitors. She turned away one, the distinguished painter John Landseer, with the explanation to Coleridge that he was “a sort of a Methody Preacher at that Unstitution, where you goes to spout, Sir”. Coleridge counted this as a rare compliment.34
Charles Lamb wrote to his friend Manning in mid-February: “Coleridge has delivered two Lectures at the Royal Institution; two more were attended, but he did not come. It is thought he has gone sick upon them. He ain’t well that’s certain – Wordsworth is coming to see him. He sits up in a two pair of stairs room at the Courier Office, & receives visitors on his close-stool [commode].”35
Davy, himself recovering from the near lethal dose of gaol fever, was appalled by what he had witnessed from the gallery of the Great Lecture Room. He felt he had observed a great mind in operation, but undergoing a process of self-destruction. Using imagery that Coleridge had himself used of Shakespeare’s mind, he saw his friend being overwhelmed by a jungle of disorder. “He has suffered greatly from Excessive Sensibility – the disease of genius. His mind is a wilderness in which the cedar & oak which might aspire to the skies are stunted in their growth by underwood, thorns, briars and parasitical plants. With the most exalted genius, enlarged views, sensitive heart & enlightened mind, he will be the victim of want of order, precision and regularity. I cannot think of him without experiencing mingled feelings of admiration, regard & pity.”36
By contrast, De Quincey gleefully recalled the “philosopher’s” abject state like the scene from a comic opera. “I often saw him, picturesquely enveloped in nightcaps, surmounted by handkerchiefs indorsed upon handkerchiefs, shouting from the attics of the Courier office, down three or four flights of stairs, to a certain ‘Mrs Brainbridge’, his sole attendant, whose dwelling was in the subterranean regions of the house…until I expected to hear the Strand and distant Fleet Street, take up the echo of ‘Brainbridge!’.”37
Besides being ill, Coleridge was intensely lonely. Throughout February and March, his letters flew out in every direction – to Asra, the Wordsworths, Lamb, De Quincey, Southey, Mrs Coleridge, and above all to the Morgans, seeking some form of solace. It was not easily to be found. To Mary Morgan he wrote of what seemed to him an inexplicably cruel reply from his wife: “from beginning to end it is in a strain of dancing, frisking high spirits – jokes about the Itch…and she notices my illness, the particulars of which and the strong & fearful suspicions entertained of the Stone, in these words – neither more nor less – ‘Lord! how often you are ill! You must be MORE careful about Colds!’”38
When John Morgan kindly suggested he retreat again to Bristol, Coleridge felt he could not abandon his lectures. Besides, he asked, “what right have I to make your House my Hospital – how am I justified in bringing Sickness, & Sorrow, and all the disgusts and all the troublesomeness of Disease, into your quiet Dwelling. Ah! whither else can I go? – To Keswick? The sight of that Woman would destroy me. To Grasmere? – They are still in their Cottage…& they have not room scarcely for a Cat.”39
In a wild attempt to lift his gloom, Coleridge now pursued a postal flirtation with Mary and Charlotte, with strange suggestive sallies and opium-inspired fancies. He wore locks of their hair round his neck, and carried Charlotte’s profile miniature in his pocket like a lucky charm. When he lost the “pretty Shirt Pin” Charlotte had sent him (another sign of chaos) he swore that he would never wear another one as long as he lived: “The sense of its real Absence shall make a sort of Imaginary Presence to me.”40
He concocted an extraordinary scheme of having Mary and Charlotte purchase dresses in Bristol, measured to fit them, but intended to be sent on as presents for Asra and Mary Wordsworth in the Lake District. This was the “Two Sisters” fantasy brought alarmingly to life. Astonishingly, John Morgan allowed this to proceed, the dresses were bought and cut and posted north, while Coleridge gallantly disputed the price, pretending they had charged him too little. Coleridge’s amorous protestations
