It's not easy to reconstruct the events of the morning of 27th December 1806. Something that traumatized Coleridge, certainly. We know that he, separated from his wife, often depressed, fond of a drink and addicted to opium, had fallen in love with Wordsworth's unmarried sister-in-law, Sara Hutchinson (who lived with the Wordsworths). We know that Sara did not feel the same way. And we know that this unrequited passion gnawed at Coleridge, drove him nearly mad, that he poured his heart out into poems and entries in his notebook, invoking Sara via the pseudonym ‘Asra’. That he went so far as to leave Britain in 1804 to go and live in Malta in part to try and cauterize the yearning, but that when he returned to England and travelled up to stay with the Wordsworths for Christmas 1806 his feelings proved much as they had always been. Then things get less clear. This is what I wrote about what followed, whatever that was, in a previous blogpost:
Richard Holmes notes in his Coleridge: Darker Reflections that the events are ‘very difficult to reconstruct.’ On the morning of Saturday 27th December Coleridge (perhaps having been up all night, and perhaps in an exhausted, opiated or drunken state) appears to have gone into Sara's room, seen something, and run away—literally run out of the house, over the fields, and into a tavern, where he stayed all day drinking and scribbling pages of desperate prose in his notebook under the portentous heading ‘The Epoch’.This isn't the consensus view. It's more usual, I suppose, among Coleridgeans to credit the ‘phantasm’ explanation. Some Romanticists, indeed, wax positively indignant at the suggestion that Wordsworth shagged Sara. John Worthern is angered by the very idea, calling it ‘the most extraordinary argument: that because Sara impressed Wordsworth with her critical opinions, it was natural that he should go to bed with her ... [it] says not one word about Wordsworth's capacity for faithfulness, or his marriage vows, or even about the sheer improbability of such an event, but assumes that because Sara was attractive it would have been natural for Wordsworth to sleep with her’. To which I'm tempted to reply; well, duh.
He later tore most of these pages out and destroyed them, but the event stayed with him, and later notebook entries often refer to it. Here are a couple of examples of what I mean. See if you can piece together from them what it was that Coleridge saw in Sara Hutchinson's room that morning:
[September 1807] O agony! O the vision of that Saturday morning!—of the Bed—O cruel! is not he beloved, adored by two—& two such Beings.—And must I not be beloved near him except as a Satellite?—But O mercy, mercy! Is he not better, greater, more manly, & altogether more attractive to any but the purest Woman? And yet, he does not pretend, he does not wish, to love you as I love you, Sara! [Notebooks 2:2148]‘He’ is Wordsworth; the two beings who adore him are presumably Sara and Mary, neither of whom adore poor old Coleridge. Half a year later STC wrote this:
[May 1808] O that miserable Saturday morning! ... But a minute and a half with ME and all the time evidently restless & going—An hour and more with Wordsworth—in bed—O agony! [Notebooks 2:3328]The ‘in bed’ is written with Greek characters, a code Coleridge often used when he wished to disguise something in his notes. This seems clearer. There's not much a man can do with an evidently unenthusiastic woman in a minute and a half, out of bed, beyond some fumbling and kissing; but a different man, married to that woman's sister though he might be, could do a lot more with her, in bed, for an hour and more. Were Wordsworth and Sara clothed when Coleridge stumbled in upon them? Well, some years STC later wrote of his agony at dreaming about Sara and William together and seeing ‘Asra's beautiful breasts uncovered’ [Notebooks, 4:4537]—an entry that may rehearse an actual memory of that morning, although it was perhaps simply a fantasy. The thing is, as Holmes points out, Coleridge also devoted a lot of time and energy in his notebooks trying to convince himself that what he had seen was only a ‘phantasm’, an opium hallucination, a ‘morbid Day-Dream’ (‘a mere phantasm and yet what anguish, what gnawings of despair, what throbbings and lancinations of positive Jealousy!’). This, though, looks to me more like the energetic attempt at self-delusion of a desperate man. Ockham's razor might suggest that whilst Coleridge probably was the worse for wear (he would hardly have stumbled unannounced into Sara's bedroom otherwise), he nonetheless saw what he saw: Wordsworth and Sara naked in bed together. It wouldn't, after all, be the first or last time in human history that a man had sex with his wife's sister; and the existence of Wordsworth's illegitimate daughter with Annette Vallon, to say nothing of the more lurid rumours surrounding his love-life, indicate that he was not what one might call an entirely sexually continent individual.
Of course it goes without saying that we cannot with absolute certainty recover what happened that morning. But I know what I think happened, and you can weigh the evidence and come to your own conclusions.
To that end, I'm going to argue that the next two entries in Coleridge's Notebooks, after (that is) the portentious ‘The Epoch’ entry above (and following the ‘three leaves cut out after the last word at the bottom of this page’)—that the next two entries to have survived from Coleridge's Notebooks, though they have hitherto remained unsourced and unidentified, in fact provide us with pretty compelling evidence-via-imputation as to what happened in Coleorton that morning.
Those entries are as follows. First:
2976 11.45 Fate-encircled Life: your days are tedious, & were it not for riotous Dancing at the hour when all matrons sleep, dreaming of Babe or Husband—Husband or Babe or both by her side, or in her arms there really being were it not for feasting, dancing, wine, which drown and hang in you every honest Thought And on your eyelids hangs so heavily, They have no power to look so high as heaven, you'd muse yourself into aOf this passage Kathleen Coburn comments: ‘No clue has been found as to source, application or the intention of this entry’. Some critics have assumed it to be STC's own composition. David Ward [in Coleridge and the Nature of Imagination: Evolution, Engagement with the World and Poetry (Palgrave 2013), 49] thinks it a piece of pre-Joyce Joycean free association:presentHell of Thought By sense of the Hell that is already round you, upon you, in you/an outcast from your nature, yea, only then being something that the Sun can shine on blameless when you pine in anguish o'er that you were and are not.
2977 11.46 And the free Light may triumph in our faces—Coburn: ‘the line is not published as Coleridge's by Ernest Hartley Coleridge [she means in his pothumous editions, Anima Poetae (1895) or Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1912)], nor has any other source been found.’ J C C Mays does print the line as one of Coleridge's, in his 2001 Bollingen/Princeton Poetical Works [1:2, p. 815 #400], although he qualifies his inclusion a little: it is, he thinks, ‘not certainly by C’. Mays adds that Coleridge ‘had recorded on a previous leaf [of the Notebooks] a crucial moment in the history of his jealous fears of SH's intimacy with WW, and an unexplained entry intervenes.’ Indeed.
Anyway: this line is not by Coleridge. It's quoted from George Chapman's Jacobean comedy All Fools (1604). Here's the relevant passage from Dodsley's Old Plays (vol 4, 1780), an edition which we know Coleridge read:
All Fools combines a plot about a son with a secret wife, who persuades his brother (the two of them are speaking here) to pretend she is actually his wife, for complicated reasons to do with their watchful, suspicious father—with a sub-plot about a man called Cornelio who is so jealous of his wife Gazetta that he challenges the man he thinks is her lover to a duel. It seems almost too on-the-nose for Coleridge's situation, or at the least for his bitter state of mind, during his epochal pub-session following his traumatic discovery on the morning of the 27th. That said, the actual line he has written into the notebook has an almost hopeful flavour, as if Coleridge is imaginatively projecting into a wished-for imaginative future when death will release Samuel, William and Sara all three to the clear light of God's love, and the whole jealous tangle will be dissolved in Sam's amorous favour: ‘Do but send/Her serjeant John Death to arrest his body,/Our souls shall rest, wench, then and the free light/Shall triumph in our faces, where now night,/Lowers at our meeting.’ Wench, no less!
I'm straying into speculation. What about that earlier passage, which J C C Mays calls ‘unexplained’ and David Ward thinks resembles Joyce's experiments with language? It's mostly from Middleton and Dekker's The Honest Whore (1604), a play thought in Coleridge's day to have been authored by Thomas Dekker solus. We're in Scene 6. The young hero Hippolito believes his true love, Infelice, the Duke of Milan's daughter, to be dead. In fact the Duke has staged a mock funeral to discourage Hippolito's suit, since he dislikes the young man, and actually Infelice is still alive; but Hippolito doesn't know that. He visits a brothel, with certain friends, but is too mournful to avail himself of the entertainments therein. One of establishment's prostitutes is Bellafront, the titular honest whore; and she, it turns out, is in love with Hippolito. He tells her that, were she his mistress, he'd forbid her from sleeping with other men and she confides in him that she desires nothing more than to be faithful with one true lover. Hippolito scoffs at this, accusing her of trying to seduce him with false promises of fidelity. There is, Hippolito insists, no such thing as an ‘honest whore’. He goes further, vowing to ‘teach’ Bellafront ‘how to loathe’ herself, which he does by delivering a lengthy speech concerning the intrinsic sordid wickedness of prostitution and prostitutes.
HIPPOLITO: A harlot is like Dunkirk, true to none;We can picture Coleridge going over these lines, in the agitated state of the immediate aftermath of ‘the Epoch.’ He is Hippolito, cathartically venting his fury on the sexual infidelities of his Bella-Sara. The phrase fatal-circled life, from the end of this speech, strikes him, and he jots it down. Hippolito's monologue continues, and another passage from it connects with STC enough for him to write it out into his notebook, riffing upon it and modifying it as he does so:
Swallows both English, Spanish, fulsome Dutch,
Back-doored Italian, last of all the French.
And he sticks to you, faith; gives you your diet,
Brings you acquainted, first with Monsieur Doctor,
And then you know what follows.
BELLAFRONT: Misery
Rank, stinking, and most loathsome misery
HIPPOLITO: Methinks a toad is happier than a whore:
That with one poison swells, with thousands more
The other stocks her veins. Harlot? Fie, fie!
You are the miserablest creatures breathing.
The very slaves of nature. Mark me else:
You put on rich attires, othersʼ eyes wear them;
You eat but to supply your blood with sin.
And this strange curse eʼen haunts you to your graves:
From fools you get, and spend it upon slaves.
Like bears and apes, youʼre baited and show tricks
For money, but your bawd the sweetness licks.
Indeed, you are their journey-women, and do
All base and damned works they list set you to,
So that you neʼer are rich. For do but show me,
In present memory or in ages past,
The fairest and most famous courtesan –
Whose flesh was dearʼst, that raised the price of sin,
And held it up; to whose intemperate boso
Princes, earls, lords (the worst has been a knight,
The meanʼst a gentleman) have offered up
Whole hecatombs of sighs, and rained in showʼrs
Handfuls of gold – yet, for all this, at last
Diseases sucked her marrow; then grew so poor
That she has begged, eʼen at a beggarʼs door.
And – wherein heavʼn has a finger – when this idol
From coast to coast has lept on foreign shores,
And had more worship than thʼoutlandish whores;
When several nations have gone over her;
When for each several city she has seen
Her maidenhead has been new, and been sold dear;
Did live well there, and might have died unknown
And undefamed – back comes she to her own,
And there both miserably lives and dies,
Scorned even of those that once adored her eyes,
As if her fatal-circled life thus ran
Her pride should end there where it first began.
[She weeps.]
What, do you weep to hear your story read?
BELLAFRONT: [Weeping] O yes, I pray, proceed.Halfway through writing this speech down, at the moment when Hippolito invokes Bellafront's despair, STC veers away into his own sermon-like speculations:
Indeed, ʼtwill do me good to weep, indeed.
HIPPOLITO: To give those tears a relish, this I add:
Youʼre like the Jews, scattered, in no place certain.
Your days are tedious, your hours burdensome;
And wereʼt not for full suppers, midnight revels,
Dancing, wine, riotous meetings, which do drown
And bury quite in you all virtuous thoughts,
And on your eyelids hang so heavily
They have no power to look so high as heaven,
Youʼd sit and muse on nothing but despair,
Curse that devil Lust, that so burns up your blood,
And in ten thousand shivers break your glass
For his temptation.
Fate-encircled Life: your days are tedious, & were it not for riotous Dancing at the hour when all matrons sleep, dreaming of Babe or Husband—Husband or Babe or both by her side, or in her arms there really being were it not for feasting, dancing, wine, which drown and hang in you every honest Thought And on your eyelids hangs so heavily, They have no power to look so high as heaven, you'd muse yourself into aHell of Thought, a state of mind with which he was only too familiar (he might have been prompted by the repentent Bellafront's later line: ‘The lowest fall can be but into hell’ [scene 11]). An outcast from her nature: for surely this could not be the true nature of the Sara he loved so deeply? Looking forward to her anguished pining, her repetance, when the sun could shine upon her blamelessness again.presentHell of Thought By sense of the Hell that is already round you, upon you, in you/an outcast from your nature, yea, only then being something that the Sun can shine on blameless when you pine in anguish o'er that you were and are not.
What happens in the play is that Hippolito's words so move Bellafront that first she tries to kill herself with a sword, and he has to prevent her. Later she gives up prostitution, despite both inducements and invective from her bawd, and ends the play respectably married (the Duke insists that the man who first seduced and deflowered her, a fellow called Matteo, must now make an honest woman of her). Hippolito, meanwhile, gets to marry the Duke's daughter Infelice.
What do we make of this? Absolute certainty is not the game here, of course, although I'd say we can at least weigh the balance of probabilities. Either Coleridge wrote these passages down as part of his ‘The Epoch’ freakout (and then tore out the three previous pages but not the page containing these two), or else he wrote them soon after that day of acutest distress. Either way it seems to me they are evidence of a man, in mental anguish, finding passages in old plays that chime with his desolate conviction that women are whores, complicated only by the unextinguished hope that they might prove honest whores at some point in the future. And when I say ‘women’, of course I mean: one particular woman. With respect to Coleridge's 27th December, there are really only two possibilities: either he actually chanced upon Wordsworth and Sara in flagrante, or else he only thought he did—the ‘phantasm’ hypothesis. Okham's razor and common sense seem to me to point us towards the former, but even if we believe the latter then we have to acknowledge that the phantasm was so convincing to Coleridge that his first instinct was to believe it wholeheartedly. These two quotations, and the plays from which they come, speak surely to a mental state in which vitriolic misogynist invective connected intimately with his state of mind. That fact in itself seems to me a second piece of evidence supporting the ‘it really happened’ thesis.
