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.

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2011

Peter Landry