eating turkey, tutoring Tom, and walking the three sisters to their milliner’s shop in Jermyn Street. The sixth-form flirtation now subtly altered into a general seduction of the whole family. He liked both Anne and Mary – the former for her intelligence, the latter for her “beautiful little leg” – but the real attraction, at least initially, was the mother, who treated him with “maternal affection”. He longed to be considered as one of her “very children”, but felt that he was physically too ugly for that.8
Back at Cambridge for the Easter term, while he assured George that he was soberly reading Homer and Horace for the Rustat Exams, he regaled the Evans family with a more colourful version of his doings, as he had promised. He had purchased a swanskin waistcoat in the latest mode, kept a cat in his rooms, and was planning to hire an allotment garden with a fellow undergraduate, George Caldwell (later a Fellow and Tutor of Jesus). He attended wine parties, at which three or four freshmen were “deplorably drunk”, and described hauling one of them out of the shallow Cambridge gutter in King’s Parade. (The man insisted that he save his friend instead: “never mind me – I can swim.”)9
In his rooms, he raised the ghost of Thomas Gray – this for Mary’s benefit – who advised him in a hollow voice: “O Young Man…write no more verses – in the first place, your poetry is vile stuff: and secondly (here he sighed almost to bursting) all poets go to – 11, we are so intolerably addicted to the Vice of Lying!”10 He sent his verses, “Odelings” and translations to Mary – also copies of Bowles, a sure mark of favour. But it was Anne he proposed as his Valentine, perhaps because she was not so dauntingly pretty. He would even have sent the drawing of a heart pierced with arrows – “But as the Gods have not made me a drawer (of any thing but corks) you must accept the will for the deed.”11
Physical inferiority was a constant, if comic note, in these early letters: he described his bad teeth, and asked for a box of “Mr Stringer’s tooth powder”, and noted that a dashing literary lady had described him as “a very gentle Bear”.12 The small, dishevelled schoolboy had grown into a large, shambling young man, with a mass of long dark hair and excitable manners. The mouth was “voluptuous”, the eyebrows stormy, the eyes bigger than ever. (All these features he would later enumerate with mock impartiality.) Nevertheless, he was proud of his robust energy, and described a marathon eight-hour walk round the villages of Cambridge with Middleton, ending benighted in a quagmire and pursued by footpads and Jack-o’-lanterns.
He also boated on the Cam, and fell in gloriously: “we swam to shore, and walking dripping home, like so many River Gods.”13 There was no doubt that “brother Coly” in his tragical farcical role was a grand success at Villiers Street, and when he went there again for the Easter vacation it began to feel like his adopted home. It was to be the first of many.
3
Despite, or perhaps because of, these distractions, it is clear that Coleridge worked very hard at Cambridge throughout the spring and summer of 1792. “I have been writing for all the prizes,” he told George, and he submitted pieces for university awards in the Greek Sapphic Ode (Brown Medal), the Latin Ode, and the Greek Epigrams. He also found time to provide George with the text of sermons to preach at Hackney, an early example of his skill in assimilating and rehandling the writings of others, invaluable for a journalist and lecturer, but a dangerous facility for a literary man later to be much tempted by plagiarism. “I have sent you a sermon metamorphosed from an obscure publication by vamping, transposition, etc – if you like it, I can send you two more of the same kidney.”14* Doggerel verses – “A Fragment found in a Lecture Room” – and an elegant Greek epitaph were also sent, carefully sandwiched round an urgent request for £5 or £10, “as I am at present cashless”.15
The first academic year closed brilliantly in June 1792, when Coleridge’s Greek Sapphic “Ode on the Slave Trade” was declared the winner of the Brown Gold Medal. He had chosen a subject that was politically popular – the West Indian slave trade had recently been debated both in parliament, and in the University Senate – and which showed his growing interest in public affairs, and the libertarian ideas of the French Revolution. Technically it was not quite flawless: Richard Porson, the new Professor of Greek, privately offered to show 134 examples of bad Greek in it. Since the Ode was twenty-five stanzas long, this was more than one error per line.
But for a freshman it was a triumph; he formally declaimed it before the assembled Fellows at Commencement on 3 July, and proudly posted an autographed copy to George, before going down to Ottery for the long vacation. George was so delighted by his youngest brother’s success that he broke out into congratulatory verses earnesly praising the Sacred Fire that flowed “spontaneous from thy golden lyre”.16 For a few brief weeks, Coleridge basked in the approval of his entire family, perhaps the one time in his life that he felt he had achieved what was expected of him.
Through July and August he made a triumphal tour of West Country relatives: Edward at Salisbury, his half-sister at Tiverton, James at Exeter, his mother at Ottery. Racy accounts flowed back to George at Hackney, now written in Latin, prose alternating with hexameters. There was much talk of events in revolutionary France – the storming of the Tuileries Palace, and Tom Paine being elected to the National Convention. Coleridge was amazed at the conservative attitudes displayed: it was thought “very sad” that Paine was “not cut to pieces at Canterbury” on his way to the Continent.17
In fact he was witnessing the beginning of the great wave of English reaction against France, which would harden further with the September Massacres in Paris. “King and Country” mobs would soon sweep through many of the great cities, and by December Paine would be burnt in effigy even on the Cornhill at Cambridge; and Joseph Priestley be driven out of Birmingham by rioters, who set fire to his house.
Coleridge was depressed by the narrow provincialism of his family circle, and later told George that this visitation to Devon “annihilated whatever tender ideas” he had treasured of the place. He found Edward vain and eccentric, indulging in “Punnomania, with which he at present foams”. While James was cold, a stickler for appearances, and much concerned with the Sidmouth Volunteers. Coleridge could only show them “the semblance of Affection – perhaps, by persevering in appearing, I at last shall learn to be, a Brother.”18 They in turn evidently found him difficult and demanding, and it is notable that his mother forbade him to drink wine at table, “not a ‘single drop’”.19
His thoughts turned instead to Frank out in India; he wrote him an affectionate letter (which has not survived), and while walking nostalgically in the Ottery churchyard had a long talk about his “most wonderful prospects” with a relative of the Governor-General of India, who said he would recommend him. Coleridge noted, with a touch of the old rivalry, that his mother “positively drank in” such dreams of Frank’s advancement. He told George, rather defensively, that he was studying Cicero hard and was determined to fulfil the expectations he had created for himself at Cambridge: “God forbid that I should perish” – this from Homer’s Iliad – “without effort and without renown.” No one in England yet knew that Frank had already committed suicide at Seringapatam.
