back “packages” of letters and information. Meanwhile Southey pondered on his emigrant’s wardrobe – “what do common blue trousers cost?” – and continued his rapturous cartooning to Bedford. “When Coleridge and I are sawing down a tree we shall discuss metaphysics: criticise poetry when hunting a buffalo, and write sonnets whilst following the plough.”40
Southey’s catalogue of pioneering delights included the full range of domestic comforts – the Fricker girls, the servants, Lovell’s two sisters, and his own mother, were all of the party. “Our society will be of the most polished order…Our females are beautiful amiable and accomplished – and I shall then call Coleridge my brother in the real sense of the word.” This last remark suggests that, for Southey at least, an engagement between Coleridge and Sara was understood; and this seems to be the clear implication of Coleridge’s first letter from Cambridge just over a fortnight later, which shows the lights of Pantisocracy burning with undimmed brightness in a forest of exclamation marks.
Sept. 18th – 10 o’clock Thursday Morning – Well, my dear Southey! I am at last arrived at Jesus. My God! how tumultous are the movements of my Heart – Since I quitted this room what and how important Events have been evolved! America! Southey! Miss Fricker! – Yes – Southey – you are right – Even Love is the creature of strong Motive – I certainly love her. I think of her incessantly & with unspeakable tenderness – with that inward melting away of Soul that symptomatizes it. Pantisocracy – O I shall have such a scheme of it! My head, my heart are all alive – I have drawn up my arguments in battle array – they shall have the Tactician excellence of the Mathematician with the Enthusiasm of the Poet.41
Poetry indeed was now much in evidence. They were exchanging bulging packets of verse, and this letter enclosed Coleridge’s early version of the sonnet “Pantisocracy”, which lyrically develops the theme of the Song to “Domestic Peace”, with the prophetic addition of a ritual dance:
…Sublime of Hope I seek the cottag’d Dell, Where Virtue calm with careless step may stray, And dancing to the moonlight Roundelay The Wizard Passions weave an holy Spell.42
This same dream-like evocation also includes a more darkly prophetic phrase, where Coleridge refers to the return of nightmares (one recalls the “vile bedfellow”) and vividly describes waking with a start “From Precipices of distemper’d sleep”.43 But Southey does not seem to have understood this side of Coleridge either.
During the fortnight in London, Coleridge had been immensely busy on Pantisocratic business. Taking lodgings – still in his filthy tramping clothes – at a tavern near Christ’s Hospital, the Salutation & Cat in Newgate Street, he sought out converts among the new generation of Grecians – the younger Le Grice, Favell – and argued with older ones like the poet George Dyer (author of The Complaints of the Poor People of England). “He was enraptured – pronounced it impregnable – He is intimate with Dr Priestley.”44
An attempt to convert the rather starchy Grosvenor Bedford – to whom Southey had provided a heady introduction – was less successful, foundering (thought Coleridge) on the “anti-genteel” appearance of his clothes and Newgate Street address, altogether too democratic. Bedford observed that he was “sorry, very sorry” about the whole scheme; a sentiment soon to be echoed by Coleridge’s own family.
Undeterred, Coleridge now began to research the whole subject in the bookshops, rediscovering on the way his old childhood passion for adventures and travel-writing. He read Brissot’s Travels in the United States (one of Poole’s favoured books), Thomas Cooper’s Some Information Respecting America (just published), and the stimulating book by Mary Wollstonecraft’s American lover, Gilbert Imlay, A Topographical Description of North America (1792).
Cooper’s book seems to have particularly attracted him. It gave details of land prices, farming methods, climate, and local resources such as wildfowl and bison, as well as painting a seductive picture of an idyllic Pennsylvanian hinterland: “At this distance, you look down upon the Susquehannah about three or four miles off, a river about half a mile broad, running at the foot of bold and steep mountains, through a valley…rich, beautiful and variagated.”45
Coleridge also made contact with a young American land-agent (ex-Christ’s Hospital) who had spent the last five years there and who enthusiastically drank punch in the Salutation & Cat, descanting on mosquitoes, Indians, bison, diet (“the Women’s teeth are bad there”), and the practicalities of twelve men clearing 300 acres in five months. Like Cooper, he also recommended the Susquehanna for its “excessive Beauty, & its security from hostile Indians”.46
One of Coleridge’s surprisingly practical conclusions was that after so much “academic” indolence, they should all spend the winter getting their bodies into “full tone and strength” and learn the “theory and practice of agriculture and carpentry”.47 He intended to write a short treatise on the whole subject, also outlining their political creed of aspheterism.
At Cambridge during this autumn term of 1794, which was to be Coleridge’s last, Pantisocracy became the talk of the whole university, and not only among the undergraduates. Coleridge argued out his ideas with his tutors, with Dr Pearce, with young dons like Francis Wrangham, as well as with friends like Caldwell. “Caldwell the most excellent, the most pantisocratic of Aristocrats, has been laughing at me – Up I arose terrible in Reasoning – he fled from me – because ‘he could not answer for his own Sanity sitting so near a madman of Genius!’”48
One debate, with the theologian Dr Thomas Edwards and a local councillor Mr Lushington (“A Democrat – and a man of most powerful and Briarean Intellect”) lasted for six hours over the tea cups, and Coleridge came back to Jesus at one in the morning triumphant, feeling that he had “exhibited closer argument in more elegant and appropriate Language, than I had ever conceived myself capable of”.49
The verse-drama, The Fall of Robespierre, was published by Benjamin Flower in October in an edition of 500 copies, and gave further publicity to the cause, circulating widely in Cambridge, London and Bath.50 Coleridge became a fashionable figure among the undergraduates, and conducted a public flirtation with a popular young actress, Elizabeth Brunton. But he was also reading and writing hard, composing many sonnets, adding a Pantisocratic section to his “Monody on the Death of Chatterton”, and beginning a long philosophic poem, “Religious Musings”, which dramatised his thoughts about the French Revolution, and the political significance of English radicals like Priestley, “Patriot and Sage”.
Long and furiously argued letters about poetry and Pantisocracy passed between him and Southey throughout these months. How should the children be educated? What status should servants have? (Coleridge thought they should evidently be equal.) What religious beliefs should be taught? How should the women be freed from domestic drudgery? Time and again Coleridge revealed himself as both the most radical, and the most visionary, of the two. “Let the married Women do only what is absolutely convenient and customary for pregnant Women or nurses. – Let the Husbands do all the Rest – and what will that all be – ?Washing with a Machine and cleaning the House. One Hour’s addition to our daily Labor – and Pantisocracy in its most perfect
