Abstract
Coleridge’s older son David Hartley Coleridge (1796–1849) was a model for how a child becomes a whole person or fails to become one. Born while Coleridge was in the full flush of his interest in Hartleyan associationism, the boy contributes by his own recalcitrance to the overthrow of this philosophy. While Coleridge learned that a good environment does not necessarily turn a child into a stable adult, he did not notice until it was too late that many of his own actions and the atmosphere that those actions created did in fact influence the boy’s later failure, and that even more influential in forming his son’s nature were the words he uttered about him. The insight of the poet and the foresight of the prophet conspired to predict the boy’s future failure, even while the boy, hearing the words, fatalistically watched the failure approaching.
The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I held on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
— Theodore Roethke, ‘My Papa’s Waltz’ (1948)
We defy augury.
— Hamlet V, 2,230
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Notes
Janet Geringer Woititz, Adult Children of Alcoholics (Pompano Beach, Florida: Health Publications, 1983), p. 4, lists qualities of adult children of alcoholics: they judge themselves without mercy, have difficulty with intimate relationships, overreact to changes over which they have no control, constantly seek approval and affirmation, usually feel that they are different from other people, are super responsible or super irresponsible, are extremely loyal, even in the face of evidence that the loyalty is undeserved, tend to lock themselves into a course of action without giving serious consideration to alternative behaviours or possible consequences; they lie and loathe themselves. Hartley Coleridge has many of these characteristics.
Claude Steiner, Games Alcoholics Play: The Analysis of Life Scripts (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1971), examines parental injunctions and scripts that alcoholics follow
Steiner’s work on games builds on Eric Berne, ‘The Alcoholic’, Games People Play ( New York: Grove Press, 1964 ), pp. 73–81.
Coleridge’s interest in Rousseau’s theory of the free child of nature, as it appears in Emile, is discussed by A. S. Byatt, Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time (London: Hogarth Press, 1989), pp. 170–86. Coleridge’s observations on marriage as humanizing can be found in CCN, 3, 2729 and in Marginalia, 1, 704. R. A. Foakes, ed. Lectures 1808–1818, 1, 105–9, summarizes his views on educational theories.
John Munder Ross, ‘In Search of Fathering: A Review’, in Father and Child: Developmental and Clinical Perspectives, ed. Stanley H. Cath, Alan R. Gurwitt and John Munder Ross (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1982) indicates that the father has appeared as ‘an austere and remote overlord uninvolved in the care of his children’ until very recent studies beginning in the 1970s. Despite Coleridge’s anticipation of this involvement, we should not apply our own expectations about good, consistent, ever-present fathers to a father working out these problems in 1796.
Poems of Hartley Coleridge, ed. Derwent Coleridge, 2 vols (London: Moxon, 1851), 2,127.
James Engell, ‘Introduction’, The Early Letters (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), has discovered evidence that two of the older Coleridge siblings committed suicide, that Samuel’s older sister’s death was traumatic for him, and that his role as the fragile survivor was crucial for his later insecurities. Engell writes (pp. 21–2), ‘Mental or physical trauma that is unresolved, that is not integrated into everyday behaviour, often leads individuals to exhibit several classic, well-recognized traits. In modern standard medical literature these include waif-like behaviour, a sense of being distracted or dissociated from the present moment, feelings of guilt or remorse — especially if the individual survives while others have perished — and a very pronounced tendency to abuse either drugs or alcohol, or both.’ Donald Reiman, ‘Coleridge’s Art of Equivocation’, Intervals of Inspiration pp. 107–52, explores the many forms that Coleridge’s early rivalry with Francis and guilt over surviving him take in his later relations with his contemporaries.
Dec. 1847, New Poems, ed. E. L. Griggs ( London: Oxford University Press, 1942 ), p. 92.
To my Unknown Sister-in-Law’, Poems, 1, 114–16. Hartley does not know his sister-in-law because Derwent, the clergyman, must now guard his reputation and spurn his disreputable brother. Fran Carlock Stephens, The Hartley Coleridge Letters: A Calendar and Index (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Humanities Research Center, 1978), quotes Derwent, ‘that circumstances of your reputation have made it impolitic for me to see you.’
Letters of Hartley Coleridge, ed. Grace Evelyn Griggs and Earl Leslie Griggs (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), p. 99.
Judith Plotz, ‘Childhood Lost, Childhood Regained: Hartley Coleridge’s Fable of Defeat’, Children’s Literature 14 (Apri1 1986),138.
Norman K. Denzin, The Alcoholic Self ( Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1987 ), p. 21.
Robert Southey, Selections from the Letters, ed. John Wood Warter (4 vols, London: Longmans, 1856), 1, 24.
Noted in Sister Mary Joseph Pomeroy, The Poetry of Hartley Coleridge: A Dissertation ( Washington: D.C.: Michie C., 1927 ), p. 62.
John Zinner and Roger Shapiro, ‘Projective Identification as a Mode of Perception and Behaviour in Families of Adolescents’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 53 (1972), 526. The authors are ‘deeply impressed with the power that parental anxiety holds in tipping the balance’.
Judith S. Seixas and Geraldine Youcha, Children of Alcoholism: A Survivor’s Manual ( New York: Harper & Row, 1985 ), p. 60.
E. L. Griggs, Hartley Coleridge: His Life and Work (London: University of London Press, 1929), p. 70. This book is the beginning of Griggs’s long, sensitive and influential fascination with Hartley’s struggles.
Melanie Klein, ‘On Identification (1955)’ in Our Adult World and Other Essays ( New York: Basic Books, 1963 ).
Julia Kristeva, ‘The Pain of Sorrow in the Modern World: The Works of Marguerite Duras’, PMLA 102, 2 (March 1987), 147. Doubles, carbon copies, and replicas form a ‘deathly symbiosis’; such mirroring produces unstable identities that invade each other (148–51). If this ‘unfulfillable dissatisfaction’ applies to mothers and daughters, it may also apply to fathers and sons.
Alice Miller, Prisoners of Childhood: How narcissistic parents form and deform the emotional lives of their gifted children, trans. Ruth Ward ((New York: Basic Books, 1981 ), pp. 64–115.
Daphne Du Maurier, The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë (Garden City: Doubleday, 1961), pp. 138–43, describes the visits of Branwell, aged 22, to the 43-year-old Hartley, and compares the fates of the two alcoholics, both of whom had been obsessed with imaginary kingdoms: ‘The urge that had driven Hartley Coleridge to drinking, and to what must have seemed to his friends an aimless existence in the hills amongst simple people, was surely the same flight from reality that drove Branwell deeper, year by year, into the infernal world. Here he was master, here he controlled his puppets, and here the inordinate ambition which, both in himself and in Hartley Coleridge, fought to overcome a sense of inferiority could best be satisfied, where it could meet no challenge.’
Hartley Coleridge, Essays and Marginalia, ed. Derwent Coleridge (2 vols, London: Moxon, 1851), 1, 33–4.
Raymond Carver, ‘Chef’s House’, Cathedral ( New York: Vintage, 1989 ), pp. 31–2.
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© 1999 Anya Taylor
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Taylor, A. (1999). In the Cave of the Gnome: Hartley Coleridge. In: Bacchus in Romantic England. Romanticism in Perspective: Texts, Cultures, Histories. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230377202_6
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