at Allan Bank they heard nothing, until Mrs Clarkson sent news of his recovery. Dorothy returned a message obviously intended to reassure him that the explosion over Asra was, in her mind at least, all forgotten. “Give my fondest love to dear Coleridge – Tell him that we have anxiously expected to hear from him, and were very uneasy till we heard from you that his health was tolerable. Whether he be with you or not, pray tell him all that I have told you respecting Sara…persuade Coleridge to write if you can…”100
But for the time being Coleridge contented himself with writing to Francis Jeffrey about the slave trade. He accepted some alterations in his essay, but insisted that Clarkson’s flat, unliterary style – “a sort of scriptural simplicity” – should not be held against him. “He, if ever human Being did it, listened exclusively to his Conscience, and obeyed its voice at the price of all his Youth & manhood, at the price of his Health, his private Fortune, and the fairest prospects of honourable ambition. Such a man I cannot regard as a mere author. I cannot read or criticize such a work as a mere literary production.”
The essay draws particular attention to the kind of “conversion experience” that Clarkson had undergone as a young man just down from Cambridge, when a Latin prize essay on the slave trade, written originally for academic honours, had come to possess his mind as the spiritual summons to a personal crusade. Coleridge was deeply interested in the psychology of this conversion, characteristic of the best elements of the Quaker culture from which it sprang.101 It led to Clarkson’s incredible perseverance in procuring evidence” against the trade, in one instance interviewing sailors “from above a hundred and sixty vessels of war” to obtain a single eyewitness account of slavery in the Calabar.102 It also led to Clarkson’s mental breakdown, from which he was saved by his marriage to Catherine.
All this was of intense personal significance to Coleridge, especially since his Malta experiences, illustrating the motivation and drive of the man of action whom nothing will deflect from his goal. He later described Clarkson to Stuart as “the Moral Steam-Engine, or the Giant with one Idea”.103 It was, of course, the very opposite of his own psychological make-up, and for that very reason of the greatest analytic interest. He wrote with passion, and Jeffrey later insisted on modulating his “too rapturous style”.104
The other changes that Jeffrey made, though without Coleridge’s permission, were politically slanted against the Ministry. But he accepted the alterations, and the £20 fee, with some murmuring and denied that the article could be described as “shamefully mutilated”.105 Yet it left an impression of political trimming which embarrassed him; and he never again risked writing for the Edinburgh Review. Instead he turned back to his idea for The Friend, his own paper in which he hoped to be free of party politics and editorial interference.
Clarkson expressed his gratitude by turning his steam engine powers on to Coleridge’s professional problems, and allowing his wife Catherine to administer to the emotional ones. Catherine, now partially an invalid, had already entered sympathetically into Coleridge’s most private difficulties, corresponding with Dorothy, having had Asra to stay in the summer of 1807, and having encouraged Henry Crabb Robinson to report on the lectures. She had also consulted Dr Beddoes about her own illness, and seems to have had a shrewd estimate of Coleridge’s troubles. He told Robinson that he had grown to love Catherine “even as my very own Sister, whose Love for me with that of Wordsworth’s Sister, Wife, & Wife’s Sister, form almost the only Happiness I have on earth”.108 Perhaps this was an example of what Wordsworth termed his “promptitude” to love; or perhaps it was simple gratitude.
The large, comfortable, yellow-brick house at St Mary’s Square became his base for the next month. Discussions centred on the setting up of The Friend, and Coleridge’s long-delayed plan to seek an opium cure under a doctor. Both were put in hand. Coleridge also corresponded with John Morgan, who was at Hatton Garden winding up his mother’s estate, and had some £1,500 of capital to invest. But if this was offered to underwrite The Friend, Coleridge took Clarkson’s and Stuart’s advice to launch his paper by subscription.107 Clarkson also suggested that Longman should be the publisher, while Davy and Thomas Bernard negotiated with the Royal Institution’s printer, Savage, on Coleridge’s behalf. The first task would be to define the aims and scope of the paper, and issue a prospectus.108
Coleridge embarked on his opium cure with equal vigour. It is not known what doctor he consulted, since Beddoes had died in December 1808, causing Coleridge temporarily to despair of ever finding a physician he could trust – “Beddoes’s Departure has taken more hope out of my Life than any former Event except perhaps T. Wedgwood’s”.109 But it seems that Clarkson found a Quaker doctor to begin treatment, starting with some attempt to regulate the daily laudanum doses. The process was slow and painful, continuing with relapses into September.
One immediate result was the new openness with which Coleridge admitted his addiction, writing to many friends in the autumn of the struggles he had undergone. This public admission of addiction is now regarded as the first, and indispensable step, of any real cure in cases of either alcoholism or drug dependency.110 Coleridge seems to have understood this intuitively, and confessed himself with almost religious extravagance. Many of these confessions would be written, with deliberately dramatic effect, on the back of printed copies of his prospectus, as if sin and restitution were being offered in the same package.
With the opium cure, and the plans for The Friend, underway by August 1808, everything suggested that Coleridge would now settle in London, where all the professional help he required was easily available. In particular, the logistics of a weekly paper – in terms of research, printing and circulation – demanded the resources of the capital city. Coleridge now made one of the most critical decisions of his career. He determined once more to return to the Lake District, and to try once again to make his home and relaunch his writing in the North. He went back to the Wordsworths and Asra and his children, drawn by a power far greater than literary ambition. He entered in his Notebook one phrase: “Plucked up my Soul from its Root.”111
1
When Coleridge left Bury St Edmund’s in August 1808, he performed one of his characteristic disappearing acts, and did not arrive at Grasmere for a month. This time it seems that he went on a kind of “retreat”, part religious and part medical, before embarking on the great gamble of his newspaper enterprise. His Notebooks suggest that he went to ground at Leeds, staying with some of Clarkson’s Quaker friends. Here he underwent the worst pains of an opium-withdrawal regime. Clarkson wrote to him secretly at the Golden Sun Inn; and John Broadhead, a Quaker bookseller, furnished him with grocery supplies and more spiritual nourishment.1
Coleridge talked at length with the Friends (the title of his paper may have been inspired partly by their unworldly sympathy) and even visited one of their schools at nearby Ackworth, noting that the “Girls’ Playground” was grassed but the
