‘A Known and Familiar Landscape’: Conversations

Abstract

When he put The Watchman to rest and was planning his retirement from active politics in May 1796, Coleridge wrote to Poole that he was considering the options of preaching and teaching and private tutoring as sources of income for himself and the now alarmingly large group of his dependants: a pregnant Sara, her mother, her brother George, and her recently widowed sister Mary and Mary’s child (Robert Lovell having died of fever) (CL I, 192). It is always difficult to gauge just how seriously Coleridge is weighing vocational options when he is writing to a wealthier friend in a position to alleviate his financial burdens. The next two years would find Coleridge in a state of constant if not always acute anxiety about how to bring what he called ‘BREAD & CHEESE’ into the family on a regular basis, and therefore would also see a number of similarly oblique cries for help (CL I, 222, 227). I say the next two years, because the Wedgwood annuity that would be bestowed upon him in January 1798 seemed at the time to answer this anxiety. The truth is, however, it was an anxiety that would afflict him on and off for the remainder of his life. On this occasion, Poole revealed that he and other friends and well-wishers of Coleridge had clubbed together to find Coleridge £35–40, with the promise of future installments – a ‘trifling mark of their esteem, gratitude, and admiration’ for the ‘extraordinary marks of sublime genius’ he displayed.¹ Again and again, Coleridge will be rescued by generous gifts of this kind, investments in Coleridge’s future productivity largely, but also, as Poole makes plain, acts of ‘gratitude’ for the sheer pleasure of having listened to him talk.