The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge

Wordsworth seized the offer. Here was a chance to escape from the city, where things had not turned out as he had hoped. In the country, free from temptation or distraction, he could settle down to work. Moreover, it was an opportunity to live with Dorothy; Racedown would be ‘our little cottage’. There they could live simply and frugally, keeping a cow and growing vegetables in the kitchen garden. Dorothy would attend to most of the domestic chores, with the help of only one maidservant (she hoped for ‘a strong girl’). Together they would care for young Basil Montagu, whose father would pay £50 a year for his keep. There was a prospect of at least one other child, a little girl, and perhaps another boy as well, one of the younger Pinney brothers, then in his early teens. Dorothy was fond of children and had experience of looking after them. For her, this was a chance at last to ‘be doing something’:

… it is a painful idea that one’s existence is of very little use which I really have always been obliged to feel; above all it is painful when one is living upon the bounty of one’s friends, a resource of which misfortune may deprive one and then how irksome and difficult it is to find out other means of support, the mind is then unfitted, perhaps, for any new exertions, and continues always in a state of dependence, perhaps attended with poverty.44

Outlining the arguments in favour of the Racedown ‘scheme’ to her friend Jane Pollard (who had recently married John Marshall, a linen manufacturer), Dorothy argued that it would give her brother ‘such opportunities of studying as I hope will be not only advantageous to his mind but his purse’. She hoped that it ‘may put William into a way of getting a more permanent establishment’.45

With the money for the two children, and interest on the capital from Raisley Calvert’s legacy (which was at last beginning to trickle through), Dorothy was confident of an annual income of at least £170 or £180. This should be enough to enable them to live comfortably, and even to make some provision for the future.* There was the prospect of a further £200 a year if her brother’s ‘great hopes’ of having the Pinney boy entrusted to him as tutor were realised.

It was agreed that Wordsworth would travel to Bristol, where he would stay at the Pinneys’ house in Great George Street until Dorothy was able to join him and they could journey on together to Racedown. No doubt John Pretor Pinney wanted to take a good look at this young man who would be occupying his country house. For Wordsworth, there was the added benefit of an opportunity to make new contacts in a city with its own flourishing intellectual life. Among those he met in Bristol, almost in passing, was a young man who had been making a good deal of noise, and whose name he had almost certainly heard already, †

Nobody knows for certain where or when Wordsworth and Coleridge first met, what the circumstances were, or what was said. There are three contradictory stories, each based on reminiscences long after the event. The confusion is not altogether surprising; it is often hard to remember how we met someone who afterwards becomes familiar. Though these two would later become so important to each other, they could scarcely have anticipated this at their first encounter.

What is known is that they met in Bristol during Wordsworth’s five-week stay in the city from around 21 August until 26 September 1795. The proof is in a letter Wordsworth wrote to Mathews from Racedown in October: ‘Coleridge was at Bristol part of the time I was there. I saw but little of him. I wished indeed to have seen more – his talent appears to me very great.’47 There is a tradition that the two met at John Pretor Pinney’s house, where Wordsworth was staying, but this may be no more than a guess. One reason for doubting it is the awkwardness of Coleridge’s being received at the house of a prominent ‘West Indian’ only a few months after delivering a public lecture condemning the slave trade. The Bristol Observer had commented on the lecture as ‘proof of the detestation in which he [Coleridge] holds that infamous traffic’. It is hard to imagine Coleridge comfortable as the guest of one of the largest slave-owners in the city, or that Pinney would have welcomed him into his home.

Fifteen years later, the painter Joseph Farington noted in his diary that the two poets had met at a political debating society, ‘where on one occasion Wordsworth spoke with so much force & eloquence that Coleridge was captivated by it & sought to know Him’.48 His note was based on a conversation with Lady Beaumont, a woman who had come to know both men well (but who had not known them at the time); though one might suspect that in being told to her, and then by her, the story had become garbled, and that Coleridge rather than Wordsworth had been the speaker. Another cause for doubt is the explanation of how they became acquainted. Coleridge was on record as an admirer of Wordsworth’s poetry; he would not have needed to hear Wordsworth speak in order to want to know him.

Half a century afterwards, Wordsworth tried to recall the circumstances of the meeting for Coleridge’s daughter Sara. Confessing that he did not have ‘as distinct a remembrance as he could wish’, he told her ‘the impression upon his mind’ was that he had seen her father and her mother together with her uncle Southey and her aunt Edith ‘in a lodging in Bristol’.49 If Wordsworth’s memory can be relied upon, the Frickers’ home in Redcliffe Hill seems the most likely location for the meeting – though why Wordsworth should have been there remains unexplained. One should remember that at this stage neither of the couples was married. The Fricker sisters had attracted plenty of unpleasant comment because of their association with the Pantisocrats; they would surely not have wanted to risk their reputations further by visiting the young men’s cramped bachelor lodgings in College Street.50

There is another difficulty with the story. ‘I met with Southey also,’ Wordsworth continued his letter to Mathews – which makes it sound as if this happened on a different occasion. By now relations between Coleridge and Southey were strained; Coleridge later claimed to have used the most scrupulous care’ to avoid Southey after his return from Shurton in mid-September. Wordsworth went on to describe Southey’s qualities: ‘his manners pleased me exceedingly and I have every reason to think very highly of his powers of mind … I recollect your mentioning you had met Southey and thought him a coxcomb. This surprises me much, as I never saw a young man who seemed to me to have less of that character …’ At Southey’s invitation Wordsworth read some passages of Joan of Arc, then in press; and Southey contributed a couple of lines to Wordsworth’s Juvenalian satire – which Wordsworth later told Wrangham were the two best verses in it.51 This sounds like a relaxed encounter, more relaxed than one might have expected had Coleridge been there at the same time. Perhaps, then, Wordsworth’s memory should not be relied upon, and in fact he met Coleridge and Southey separately.

Despite so much uncertainty, the available fragments of evidence make it possible to date their meeting to within the space of only a few days.

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