William Wordsworth
Back in England, Wordsworth was to hover about
the channel with a view to getting immediately back
to France. His biographer, Burra observed: “During
the summer he had spent a month of calm and glassy
days in the Isle of Wright, waiting for his opportunity
which never came then; but he watched in despair the
naval preparations for war.” Wordsworth slowly and
reluctantly came to see the impossibility of his situation:
he would have to wait out the war. ...
These were dark times [of war], and the average Englishmen could see
French spies everywhere. The regular sort of person that
lived around or at Nether Stowey were sure that they had
some in their midst. It was that strange group at Alfoxden
as headed up by the newcomers. They had to be spies!
Soon there was to be a surreptitious but close watch on the
Wordsworths and those who came to visit. ...
Whatever one might have to say about Wordsworth’s
poetry or his politics, one thing is plain: all those who
were in close communion with Wordsworth -- his
neighbors, friends and family -- had the highest respect
and deepest affection for him. Even his contemporaries
gave him due praise. ...
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Coleridge’s return to Cambridge occurred in April of
1794. During this second stint at Cambridge, Coleridge is
seen to be more industrious -- not in pursuing the regular
courses, but rather, as so many young men were doing
at the time, imbibing revolutionary ideas. These young
men, as young men always have, talked long and hard
about how society in its existing formation was rotten and
dreamt how things might be changed. ...
At the first of March, Sarah, then three months
pregnant, had left Coleridge in London intending with
little Harley to visit friends at Kempsford. A month
later, on April 6th, Coleridge arrived at Dove Cottage.
Ostensibly, he had gone to assist Wordsworth in the
putting together of the 2nd edition of Lyrical Ballads. At
this time, too, at the Wordsworths’ there was to be found
Wordsworth’s brother, and, at least, one of the Hutchinson
sisters, Mary. ...
An understanding of the wide spread use of opium will
lead one to conclude that it was not the mere use of opium
that lead to Coleridge’s ruin but rather his extensive and
continuous use of the stuff. Keats, Byron, Shelley, Scott:
they all took it, laudanum, off and on. Bristol, at the close
of the 18th-century, was at the center of a luminous drug
circle revolving around a Dr. Beddoes ...
Percy Bysshe Shelley
... in the days under review, it is not
likely that Oxford was a place where intensive scientific
investigation was carried out in respect to the natural
world. It was still very much an educational institution
under the strictures of religion. Every student, in order
to gain admission, was obliged to sign the Thirty-nine
Articles of the Church of England. Robert Southey
observed that “Oxford is a school for divinity, and for
nothing else.” The religious propensity of the times,
as was fully reflected at Oxford, proved to be the rock
which Shelley ran up upon. ...
While Harriet was sick over Shelley’s involvement
with Mary Godwin, Mary was over the moon. Letting
Harriet stew over the matter (she was then about four
months pregnant), Shelley and Mary, together with
Claire, now that war in Europe had come to an end,
determined to go to the continent. So off they went for a
six week trip. They left, it would appear, without taking
their leave of anyone in particular. Shelley arranged for
a carriage and the girls (Mary was seventeen, Claire
was sixteen) slipped out of their parents’ house and off
they drove to Dover. ...
Mary had no way of knowing, on the 8th, that Shelley
had set sail. The days passed and the concern of the three
woman at Casa Magni turned into worry. ... A letter had come in
from Pisa; it was from Hunt. It sat there on the table
for a day or two before Mary determine to open it up. ...
Leigh Hunt
Together with his elder brother, John, Leigh Hunt
established one of the most famous newspapers of the
time, The Examiner. The Examiner, a Sunday paper,
was one in which Leigh Hunt was given to express his
liberal views. Such expressions of liberalism were to get
the Hunts into trouble with the government of the day,
which was more interested in prosecuting the war against
Napoleon than with civil liberties at home. ...
On May 13th, 1822, the Hunt family went aboard
a sailing vessel, the David Walter, which set sail for
Italy; the vessel arrived at Genoa on June 15th, it then
sailed down to Leghorn arriving there on the first of
July. Within days of Hunt’s arrival in Italy, Shelley died
in a boating accident. The death of Shelley left Leigh
Hunt without his chief ally in respect to the forthcoming
publication of the planned periodical, The Liberal. ...
John Keats
On March 13th, the very day that Shelley left Dover
for Calais on his way to Italy, Keats was writing his
friend Bailey at Oxford. He was then at Teignmouth with
his brothers. By April 8th, still at Teignmouth, he wrote
that Tom is getting “greatly better.” It was at this point
that John expressed his intention to “within a Month to
put my knapsack at my back and make a pedestrian tour
through the North of England, and part of Scotland ...”
On hearing of this bad spell that Keats had in June,
his friend and publisher of his poems, Leigh Hunt,
determined to get involved. Hunt brought Keats into his
home. Incidently, it was during the summer that Keats’
last volume was published and which contained his best
works. In July there was talk of Keats getting himself
off to the warming climate of Italy. ...
Keats was a bud cut by a fatal frost. Richard Dowling
thought that much the same thing could be said of Shelley
who also died at a young age in Italy -- only 17 months
after the death of Keats. They “were never regular racehorses.
They were colts that bolted in their first race and
ran until they dropped.” ...
Robert Southey
These lovely ideas were to become unraveled
about as quick as they were knitted up. Of all the
group (Coleridge, et al.) Southey was the first . after
first suggesting as an alternative to America, that the
community might be set up in Wales -- to proclaim that
pantisocracy was unworkable. The fundamental flaw, of
course, whether they saw it this way or not, was that such
schemes cannot work where everyone was expected to
throw all they have into the communal pot and hope that
everybody else does the same. Given the nature of man
such schemes couldn’t possibly work. Besides, even
to get such a community set up would take a fair bit of
money, money which none of these young dreamers
had. However, it does seem that certain of these young
pantisocrats had lined up three “mild and lovely women”
for their wives: the three Fricker sisters. ...
By age 38, Southey had quite given up all of the
revolutionary notions that he had possessed as a young
man. By then, 1812, he was “a state pensioner and a
champion of the party of order in the Quarterly Review...”
What Southey, and Wordsworth too, had turned into were
supporters of British society; and, certainly it is plain,
that British society had become supporters of Southey
and Wordsworth.
Lord Byron
Lord Byron’s life is a moral tale. While Byron was
born an aristocrat, he led the life of a vagabond. He was
a genius subject only to his own ruling passions. He was
born with a malformation of one foot, which left him with
a life long limp. Notwithstanding, he grew up to be a dark
and handsome man; the women liked Byron and he liked
the women; his sexual exploits are legend.With Byron’s advancement to a Baronetcy came
title to Newstead Abbey, the ancestral Byron estate
in Nottinghamshire. No sooner after she settled legal
matters at London, Catherine took her ten year old son
to Newstead Abbey, only “to find it in almost complete
decay.” ...
Quarrels through these years continued with his
mother over his extravagances at Cambridge and London,
and his arrangements with the money-lenders. He passed
his days not so much studying as much, with his friends,
shooting pistols, playing cricket, and swimming. ...
Very early in Byron’s life, the little girls about him
made his heart go pitter-patter. For instance there is,
when he was but a boy of eight, the record of his first
love affair. It amounted to a passionate attachment to
Mary Duff, a distant cousin he met at dancing-school
likely at Aberdeen. The attachment that gets more
attention, however, is the one that Byron had for his
cousin, Mary Chaworth of Annesley Hall ...
Byron continued to be the object of Caroline’s scorn
for a considerable period of time. It might have passed
in a shorter time, except that Byron was bedding one of
Caroline’s friends, Lady Jane Oxford, an affair which
Caroline came to know about, and which accounts --
together with her natural proclivities -- for Caroline’s
extreme reactions. ...
This tenancy to keep exotic animals around first
showed itself during his university days at Cambridge
where he use to keep a bear on a leash. When in Italy
-- he was to call it “Byron’s Zoo” -- Shelley listed “ten
horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats,
an eagle, a crow and a falcon; and all of these, except for
the horses, walk about in the house, which every now
and then resounds with their unarbitrated quarrels, as
if they were the masters of it.” Shelley recounted what
he observed when he went on a visit to Byron’s and
saw that upon leaving, his list was not complete for he
“met on the grand staircase five peacocks, two guinea
hens, and an Egyptian crane” and wondered who “all
these animals were before they were changed into these
shapes.” Shelley’s biographer, Edmund Blunden tells
the story on how Byron had ordered up a goose which, it
was intended, should be roasted for a holiday meal. The
goose arrived ahead of time, alive of course that being
the best way to keep it fresh. During the period of time
spent fattening the bird (a month), the goose and Byron
had become friends and he did not go into Byron’s oven,
another just before the event was brought in. Countess
Guiccioli found this to be all very amusing.
2011