–. Nothing was more common than for a large party to exclaim in my hearing, that I was aprodigy etc etc etc – so that, while I remained at my Uncle’s, I was most completely spoilt & pampered, both mind and body.”8 But this vision of forbidden, urban, adult delights – which attracted Coleridge’s gregarious nature all his life – was merely a prologue to the tribal, schoolboy horrors to come.
In July he “donned the Blue coat & yellow stockings”, and went down to the prep school at Hertford for six weeks, where he was briefly very happy – “for I had plenty to eat & drink, & pudding & vegetables almost every day”. Then, in September 1782, he was delivered up to the Under Grammar School of Christ’s Hospital, one small boy among 600, with his private world reduced to an iron bedstead in a “ward” or dormitory of fifteen others. For the next three years his existence was remembered with self-pity and righteous indignation: “Oh, what a change! depressed, moping, friendless, poor orphan, half starved”.9
These early, beastly memories of Christ’s Hospital have a familiar ring, and variations can be found in the schooldays of many English writers: Shelley, Dickens, or Kipling. The rising bell at 6 a.m.; the miserable food, consisting largely of bread, thin porridge, and bad beer – and “never any vegetables”; the heartless “Nurse” or dormitory matron, who scrubbed him with stinging sulphur ointment against ringworm; the ill-fitting clog shoes and the nauseous stench of the communal boot-room and lavatories; the flogging in the classrooms and the loneliness in the cloisters. He later indignantly told Godwin that he was treated with “contumely & brutality”, and frequently took refuge “in a sunny corner, shutting his eyes, & imagining himself at home”.10
There is however evidence that Coleridge, with his verbal fluency (despite the Devon accent which he retained all his life), and his powerful, moody temperament (sometimes utterly withdrawn, sometimes exuberantly outgoing and wild) stood up quite well to the ordeal. Despite the “excessive subordination” to senior boys required, there was little overt suggestion of bullying or homosexuality. Though it is true that in his adult dreams nightmares of Christ’s Hospital would often surface, suggesting more subtle forms of persecution, physical humiliations and, above all, profound, almost disabling homesickness. Many of these dreams would centre on the headmaster, James Bowyer, who became a dominating figure in the later part of his schooling.
Coleridge’s first known letter home, which dates from February 1785 – when he was twelve – says almost nothing of school life, but mentions a litany of Ottery friends he wishes to greet, and a careful enumeration of small presents sent to him: “two handkerchiefs and the half-a-crown from Mr. Badcock…a half-a-crown from Mrs Smerdon, but…not a word of the plumb cake…My aunt [Bowdon] was so kind as to accommodate me with a box”. It was a stiff, schoolboy performance, with only tiny glimpses of his real life and thoughts: “I suppose my sister Anna’s beauty has many admirers. My brother Luke says that Burke’s Art of Speaking would be of great use to me.” It is signed rather formally to his mother, “your dutiful son”; but has a revealing concession in its postscript: “P.S. Give my kind love to Molly.”11
3
At this period Christ’s Hospital was sharply distinguished from the great public schools such as Eton (attended by Shelley), Harrow (Byron) or Westminster (Southey), with their aristocratic connections, anarchic regimes, and in-built sense of class privileges. There were no riots, no underground magazines, no tutorial friendships between boys and masters, no freedoms outside school hours. It was a highly conservative institution, largely funded by philanthropists from the City of London, with spartan facilities and food, lengthy church attendances, and strictly practical aims for most of its pupils.
The main building, founded by Edward VI in 1552, on the site of a Franciscan friary, stood on Newgate Street close to the prison burnt down by the Gordon Rioters in 1780. To the south rose the dome of St Paul’s, to the east was the Bank of England, to the west the Smithfield Meat Market and the Inns of Court. The boys ate together in the Great Hall with pictures of its benefactors gazing down upon them, attended the church in a special gallery above the nave, and played in a walled and cloistered courtyard. Except on leave-days they were forbidden to go out into the city streets – though there are early records of Coleridge’s truancy – and there was a single long vacation of three weeks during the summer.
Of the three main school divisions, the Writing School prepared boys for commercial apprenticeships at the age of fourteen or fifteen; the Mathematical and Drawings Schools sent boys into the navy and the East India Company at the age of sixteen; and the Grammar School retained the brightest pupils for professional careers in the law, the army, or the Church. The most gifted of these, directly supervised by James Bowyer, were put into a Classical Sixth Form, known as the Deputy Grecians, and from there three or four boys a year – distinguished as the Grecians, with special uniforms and privileges – would go on to Oxford or Cambridge.
The powerful sense of intellectual hierarchy, which affected Coleridge for the rest of his life, inculcated fear and respect for all social authority. When a Grecian walked through the cloisters every other boy was expected to get out of his way. All discipline was enforced by Bowyer with savage and frequent flogging. There was great rivalry between the boys concerning the social standing of parents, and outside gifts of food and money – well reflected in Coleridge’s letters. Nearly half the boys were “orphans” (usually from a widowed family), and the daily Christ’s Hospital hymn referred humiliatingly to their charity status. Coleridge’s frequent references to himself as an orphan, poor and neglected, partly reflect this intense consciousness of status throughout his time at Christ’s Hospital.
Despite the severity of the institution – or perhaps because of it – the school did produce at this time a number of notable literary men and scholars, all from the ranks of the Grecians. Among these were Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, the poet George Dyer, Thomas Barnes (the future editor of The Times), and Thomas Middleton (a classical scholar who became the first Bishop of Calcutta). Of these, Lamb and Middleton were Coleridge’s fellow pupils, the former two years junior, the latter two years senior. All retained vivid and painful memories of Christ’s Hospital.
Lamb, who would later become one of Coleridge’s most faithful friends and confidants, touchingly projected himself into the older boy’s homesickness. In “Christs Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years Ago” (1820), Lamb – as Elia – wrote in Coleridge’s imagined voice of schoolboy grief: “My parents and those who should care for me were far away…How, in my dreams, would my native town (far in the west) come back, with its church, and trees, and faces! How I would wake weeping, and in the anguish of my heart exclaim upon sweet Calne in Wiltshire!” Lamb altered Ottery to Calne (the Wiltshire town where Coleridge wrote his own memoirs of Christ’s Hospital in the Biographia) to avoid upsetting the Ottery Coleridges with accusations of – perhaps romanticised – neglect.
4
Coleridge’s own private recollections have a somewhat different tone. He describes himself as magnificently idle in class – until his genius was unfortunately unearthed by Bowyer. He was a down-at-heel ragamuffin in the cloisters, a frequenter of illegal bathing expeditions to the New River in the East End, and a voracious reader of extra-curricular books. These were obtained from a public lending library in nearby King Street, to which he had been given a ticket – so he said – by an unknown gentleman he bumped into in the Strand.
The story, told long after to Gillman, describes another of his epic daydreams: he was Leander swimming the Hellespont, and “thrusting his hands before him as in the act of swimming” he inadvertently struck the man’s
