Chapter XXI: The Morgans, Bristol, and Calne

[John James Morgan, the joint friend of Coleridge and Southey in their Pantisocratic days, was the son of a Bristol merchant, and as early as 1795 was acquainted with Coleridge (see Letter 16). It was to the house of Morgan that Coleridge repaired after his return from Malta, at the close of 1807, when he felt himself "ill, penniless, and worse than homeless" (Meteyard's _Group of Englishmen_, p. 325); and in the _Courier_ of 10th December 1807 appeared a poem, entitled the _Wanderer's Farewell_, addressed to Mrs. Morgan and Charlotte Brent, her sister. Morgan was at one time possessed of a fortune of £10,000 to £15,000 (Southey's _Life and Cor._, iv. 361); but adverse circumstances had come against him, and he and his family had removed to Hammersmith, London. After the quarrel with Wordsworth, Coleridge, as we have already seen, went to the Morgans, and remained off and on with them in the various places of their abode for the six years between 1810 and 1816. Not only were the Morgans kind hosts to Coleridge; Mrs. Morgan exercised a considerable command for good over him, and put compulsory measures in force when he was indulging in opium.

Although the Morgans were not exactly literary people, they were discerners and appreciators of the genius of Coleridge; and it was while staying with them that he produced his greatest contributions to thinking. The Morgans changed about a good deal. In November 1810 they were living at 7, Portland Place, Hammersmith; in April 1812 they had removed to 71, Berners Street: in April 1814 they were at 2, Queen's Square, Bristol; in September Coleridge and they had taken up quarters at Ashley, Box, near Bath; on 3rd November they were at Bath; and on 10th November they had removed to Calne, in Wiltshire.

It would make an interesting study to detail in full all the changes of Coleridge's political creed from the time when he was an ardent enthusiast for the French Revolution to his gradual evolution into a conservative whose creed was

The Sensual and the Dark rebel in vain.

As men advance in years they generally believe less in the power of politics to accomplish what can be achieved only by Religion, Poetry, Art and Culture. The contemplation of Coleridge's change of view from Radicalism to temperate Conservatism, registering the natural swing of the pendulum from Youth to Age, is a most inviting study for the statesman. Southey and Wordsworth underwent the same change, but their evolution is not so instructive as that of Coleridge.

A Tory in the strictest sense of the word Coleridge never was; for he always claimed right to dissent and did at times dissent from the ministry of the hour. A striking instance of his dissension was given while living at Calne, when he strongly objected to the imposition of new corn duties when wheat was selling at 63_s._ a quarter and the quartern loaf sold at 11_d._ The working people were in a state of starvation, and Coleridge espoused the cause of the starvers and got up a Petition against the duties proposed. He even became the ringleader of the local agitation. He writes to Dr. Brabant of Devizes (6½ miles away) in the Spring of 1815: "On Wednesday we had a public meeting in the Market Place, at Calne, to petition Parliament against the Corn Bill. I drew it up for Mr. Wait, and afterwards mounted on the butcher's table made a butcherly sort of speech of an hour long to a very ragged but not butcherly audience, for by their pale faces few of them seemed to have had more than a very occasional acquaintance with butcher's meat. Loud were the huzzas, and if it depended on the inhabitants at large, I believe they would send me up to Parliament" (_Westminster Review_, 1870, p. 348).

Coleridge and the Morgans themselves were not in a flourishing condition. They were in straitened circumstances, and Coleridge wrote the following two letters to Cottle in March 1815.