returned from Plymouth via Exeter on 4 October, evidently upset, and having – according to Coleridge – dreamed a strange allegorical dream, that Death “as he is commonly painted” had touched him with his dart. He drank a bowl of punch, went to bed, and died that same night of a massive heart attack. Coleridge always remembered his mother’s “shriek” in the night, and his instant realisation that “Papa is dead”. He may have felt some sense of childish responsibility for his father’s loss (if he had quarrelled less with Frank, it might never have happened); or he may obscurely have blamed his mother for forcing one more premature departure from Ottery. Certainly in later life he came to fear his own death at night from “a fit of Apoplexy”. At all events, the sense of bereavement was very strong, and henceforth he would often refer to himself as an “orphan”. He was not quite nine.1
His life now altered rapidly. Ann Coleridge lost her position and income, and almost immediately the family moved out of the spacious Vicarage and School House, into temporary lodgings provided by Sir Stafford Northcote in the Warden’s House nearby. Of the children still nominally at home, George was at Oxford, Luke at medical school, both with fees to pay. She was now largely dependent on what James, still making his way in the army, and John, far away in India, could provide. It was decided that Nancy would have to get work as a shop-assistant in a milliner’s at Exeter; and Sam would have to be sent to a boarding school on a charity grant. That winter he was temporarily allowed to continue as a day scholar, without fees, at the King’s School by the new headmaster Parson Warren. Sam pronounced his father’s replacement to be a “booby”, and picked holes in his grammar-teaching, “every detraction from his merits seemed an oblation to the memory of my Father”.2 Plans for Charterhouse fell through, and Judge Buller recommended a formal application to Christ’s Hospital, London, originally founded for the sons of needy clergy, famous throughout the city as “blue-coat charity boys”. It was the same uniform that Thomas Chatterton had once worn in Bristol.
On 28 March 1782, Sam’s godfather Mr Samuel Taylor drew up the petition to Christ’s Hospital, countersigned by the new vicar the Reverend Fulwood Smerdon MA. (The job of vicar and headmaster had now been divided, a final testimony to the Reverend John’s great abilities.) Ann’s financial anxieties were emphasised by the rather misleading way she was described as being left “with a Family of Eleven Children, whom she finds it difficult to maintain and educate without assistance”. She also agreed to “the right of the Governors of Christ’s Hospital to apprentice her son”, if Sam did not prove academically promising.3 This clause effectively put Sam’s destiny in the hands of the Christ’s Hospital authorities, and did indeed make him the child of an institution. Family worries about this were to be expressed most forcibly by John in India, when he later wrote from Surat enclosing a handsome £200, and urging James not to neglect Sam’s education “in any respect whatever”, and suggesting he seek the help of “his very good friend” General Godard. John, incidentally, also strongly objected to the plan for Nancy: “I would rather live all the rest of my days on Bread and Water than see my sister standing behind a counter where she is hourly open to the insults of every conceited young Puppy that may chance to purchase a Yard of Ribbon from her.”4
James, however, busily seeking promotion from his captaincy, does not seem to have bothered much with Sam, content to pursue his own very successful career. He became a lieutenant-colonel in the Exmouth and Sidmouth Volunteers, married a local heiress Frances Taylor in 1788, and by 1796 was able to purchase the Chanter’s House at Ottery, thus becoming – as Coleridge said with some irony – “a respectable Man”. John, on the other hand, continued to worry about his little brother up to the time of his own death. In one of his last letters from Bengal in 1785, he wrote to James: “I have been thinking these some days past of getting Sam, a couple of years hence, sent out to me as Cadet at the India House. Let me know your sentiments on this scheme…”5 Thoughts of John, and Frank, far away in India were to have subtle influence on Sam’s restless dreams in the future.
Frank’s convoy had been met at Bombay by his brother John, who arranged for his transfer from the navy to the Indian army as a subaltern. Dashing and high-spirited (“the young dog is as fond of his sword as a girl is of a new lover,” wrote John approvingly), Frank was promoted to an ensign of infantry in 1784, and served with distinction for eight years, until wounded in a night-attack on Seringapatam. His commanding officer, Lord Cornwallis, presented him with a gold watch for his gallantry. But Frank contracted a fever, and shot himself in delirium soon after, dying in 1792 aged twenty-two.
Coleridge was much impressed by this romantic military career, which came to seem a reproach for his own fecklessness at Cambridge (as his mother no doubt pointed out), and later composed a fictional sketch of Frank’s upbringing in his poem “The Foster Mother’s Tale”, which ends with a haunting image of the young man’s loss in the distant “golden lands”. Characteristically, the fever and suicide is transformed into a moonlit voyage up an imaginary river. The “poor mad youth”
…seized a boat,
And all alone, set sail by silent moonlight
Up a great river, great as any sea,
And ne’er was heard of more: but ‘tis suppos’d
He liv’d and died among the savage men.6
2
Sam was accepted at Christ’s Hospital (probably through the influence of Judge Buller) for the Michaelmas term of 1782, with a six-week preliminary attendance at the preparatory school at Hertford beginning in July. If Ann Coleridge did not wish to be parted from her youngest child, there is no sign of this, for she immediately despatched him to London in April to spend the spring and summer with her brother John Bowdon. The impression that she was glad to have him off her hands is increased by the remarkable fact that he was not allowed back to Ottery, during the brief Christmas and summer vacations, more than three or possibly four times over the next nine years. Significantly, Coleridge left no memory of his parting from his mother at Ottery, except in a sonnet of 1791 when he refers rather formally to how his
weeping childhood, torn
By early sorrow from my native seat,
Mingled its tears with hers – my widow’d Parent lorn.7
Nor is there much evidence of correspondence between school and home: of his seven known schoolboy letters, only one is to his mother; another is to Luke, and the remaining five are to George, whose role as father-figure became increasingly evident.
The first three months in London with Uncle Bowdon – who kept a tobacconist’s near the Stock Exchange and was also a part-time clerk for an underwriter – were recalled with immense and comic satisfaction by Coleridge. Far from grieving for the countryside of Ottery, he revelled in his first experience of the big city, and felt his wings as a talker and social being. Bowdon was a kindly, generous man but also a drinker – “a Sot” who was “fleeced unmercifully” by his servant in the shop, and bullied at home by “an ugly and an artful” daughter. Sam accompanied him on his frequent escapes to the taverns, and had his first unforgettable taste of the great talking-shop of London, the Johnsonian world of clubs and coffee-houses, with its last echoes of the elegant, rakish Augustan society of Steele and Addison.
It was all highly unsuitable for a child of nine and a half, and pleased him no end. “My Uncle
