one cold summer night at Keswick, he thought he heard one of his own children moaning: “listened anxiously, found it was a Calf bellowing – instantly came on my mind that night, I slept out at Ottery – & the Calf in the Field across the river whose lowing had so deeply impressed me – Chill+Child+Calf-lowing probably the rivers Greta and Otter.”46 Other versions of the incident appear in Act III of his verse-play Osorio; in his “Monody on the Death of Thomas Chatterton”; in stanza seven of his great poem “Dejection”; and in the fragmentary prologue to “The Wanderings of Cain”, possibly as late as 1828:
Alone, by night, a little child,
In place so silent and so wild –
Has he no friend, no loving mother near?47
What was its significance to Coleridge? It was clearly the idea of being the abandoned and outcast child, the child “lowing” like a calf for its lost parents. The bitter rivalry with Frank, for food and affection, was merely a pretext for this much deeper sense of grievance. Coleridge never harboured a lasting grudge against his brother, but after his departure for India, even tended to hero-worship him. He wrote to George in 1793: “he was the only one of my Family, whom similarity of Ages made more peculiarly my Brother – he was the hero of all the little tales, that make the remembrance of my earliest days interesting!”48
For the first time in his life he had taken the fictional drama of the outcast – Robinson Crusoe, Philip Quarll – and played it out in childish reality, enacting a kind of symbolic revenge against his parents, and especially his mother. The whole point of his flight, his night of “exile”, was to demand further expressions of their affection: his father’s tears, his mother’s “outrageous” joy. It was to be the first of many such symbolic escapes throughout his life, and his poetry, acts of flight and exile, with their undertone of “inward and gloomy satisfaction”.
Yet the exploit remains a strange episode, a piece of wilful mischief by a spoilt, clever, and highly strung child determined to be the centre of attention. Little Sam was, after all, very far from being outcast or abandoned at this time. Relations with his mother may have been passionate and difficult, but the Reverend John paid much attention to the boy, encouraging him once more in his adventurous reading, and devoting long evenings to the development of his extraordinary mind.
Of the following year, 1780, Coleridge recalled with something close to idyllic happiness:
I read every book that came in my way without distinction – and my father was very fond of me, & used to take me on his knee, and hold long conversations with me. I remember, that at eight years old I walked with him one winter evening from a farmer’s house, a mile from Ottery – & he told me the names of the stars – and how Jupiter was a thousand times larger than our world – and that the other twinkling stars were Suns that had worlds rolling round them – & when I came home, he shewed me how they rolled round –. I heard him with a profound delight & admiration; but without the least mixture of wonder or incredulity. For from my early reading of Faery Tales, & Genii etc etc – my mind had been habituated to the Vast.49
Looking back at this early vision of the natural universe, opened up to him by his beloved father, Coleridge characteristically saw the beginnings of his own metaphysical interests even at the age of eight. He felt that his mind was naturally formed to a religious, mystical conception of the world, always reaching towards a sense of infinity and unity within the creation. Once again he was interpreting his childhood along Romantic lines, opposed to the whole analytic and rational tradition of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment education. It is interesting to compare this with John Stuart Mill’s criticism of his own strictly utilitarian upbringing in his Autobiography (1873).
Coleridge put this to Tom Poole with what was, at twenty-five, glowing confidence in his own powers.
I regulated all my creeds by my conceptions not by my sight – even at that age. Should children be permitted to read Romances, & Relations of Giants & Magicians, & Genii? – I know all that has been said against it; but I have formed my faith in the affirmative. I know no other way of giving the mind a love of “the Great”, & “the Whole”…I have known some who have been rationally educated, as it is styled. They were marked by a microscopic acuteness; but when they looked at great things, all became a blank & they saw nothing…and uniformly put the negation of a power for the possession of a power – & called the want of imagination, Judgment, & the never being moved to Rapture Philosophy!50
That childlike sense of reverence and wonder remained with him, almost miraculously, far into middle age.
Despite such lyrical recollections as this, it is hard to decide how happy Sam really was at Ottery. There are no more than fleeting references to him in his brothers’ letters, and Coleridge’s own evidence is curiously contradictory. Against the golden memories of his father’s kindness, there are the tight-lipped references to his mother, and (in later letters to George) the forlorn recollections of his brothers’ lack of interest. In 1804 he would write with sudden vehemence, “I was hardly used from infancy to Boyhood; & from Boyhood to Youth most, MOST cruelly,” but this was at a time of general discouragement, and self-pity.51
In his poetry, the picture is consistently magical and dreaming, but this was part of the carefully orchestrated Romantic myth. It has to be set against the equally vivid account of the night-escape to the Otter, which might almost suggest a disturbed child. The desire to perform, to please, to claim attention, to impress his elders, is certainly very evident; and this he would carry into later life. With it came those entrancing natural powers of talk and charm which never left him. It was a charismatic gift, coupled with the effect of his extraordinary eyes, almost like that of an actor or an old-fashioned mountebank. It was confirmed by all who met him (whether approving or not), and eventually put to work professionally in a long public career as lay preacher, popular lecturer, society talker, improvisatore, and philosophical sage or guru. Yet against this, the solitariness of his imaginative life, with its obsessional reading, its dream-haunted inner world, its terrors and self-doubts, also established itself in these earliest days.* One of the saddest, and yet most ironic, reflections he ever made on these first years – coming from the great champion of innocent Romantic childhood – was given with a sigh to Gillman: “Alas! I had all the simplicity, all the docility of the little child, but none of the child’s habits. I never thought as a child, never had the language of a child.”52
1
Whatever the quality of Coleridge’s happiness at Ottery, everything changed just before his ninth birthday, with the sudden and wholly unexpected death of his father, the Reverend John, in October 1781. The circumstances suggest considerable stress within the family.
It had been decided – perhaps because of the rivalry and battles between the two youngest brothers – to send Frank into the navy at the early age of twelve. He was signed on as a junior midshipman under Admiral Graves, a family friend, and taken to Plymouth with his small sea-chest by his father, where he joined a convoy for Bengal. It must have been a heart-breaking
