be considered as twins of a common parent, and the amiable propensities too often
sustain and foster their unhandsome sisters.
(For the old romans personified virtues
and vices, both as Women.)
When STC wrote these words, hartley
was ten. They were planning to visit relatives
in ottery, and STC was moved to proffer some
advice on deportment. After speeding through
his son’s virtues, including kindness and
imagination, he took a protracted epistolary
tour of his vices, from hartley’s “labyrinth of
day-dreams” and “habits of procrastination” to
his loquaciousness at the dinner table and his
regrettable tendency to stand in half-opened
doorways. In order to ensure that the letter’s
contents were fully absorbed, STC recom-
mended that hartley reread it “every two or
three days.”
Much had happened, little of it happy, since
STC calmed hartley’s tears by carrying him to
the orchard and showing him the moon. he
had become estranged from his wife, a woman
whom their friend richard reynell described
as “sensible, affable, and good-natured—thrifty
and industrious, and always neat and prettily
dressed.” Maybe so, but Sara was no intellec-
tual, and her husband’s want of steadiness, both
emotional and financial, had turned her into a
nag. “If my wife loved me, and I my wife, half
as well as we both love our children, I should be
the happiest man alive,” STC wrote. “But this
is not—will not be.”
When hartley was two, STC decamped
for ten months to germany. Upon his return,
he fell in miserable, unrequited love with the
sister of the woman who was to marry William
Wordsworth. When hartley was seven, STC
left for two and a half years for Malta and never
returned to his family, which by then included
another son, Derwent, and a daughter, Sara. It
fell to hartley’s dull but morally irreproachable
Uncle Southey to house, feed, and play sur-
rogate father to the Coleridge children. From
that point on, STC and hartley spent only
short, confusing stretches together. As Charles
Lamb put it, STC “ought not to have a wife or
children; he should have a sort of diocesan care
of the world, no parish duty.”
By the time hartley was ten, he was a
dreamy boy who misplaced his books and
slates, who was so bad at sports that he was
said to have two left hands, who bit his arm
in paroxysms of self-directed rage, who re-
fused to continue reading once robinson
Crusoe left his island. “he is afraid of receiv-
ing pain to such a degree that, if any person
begins to read a newspaper,” wrote Southey,
“he will leave the room, lest there should be
anything shocking in it.” hartley was undeni-
ably a peculiar child. however, in STC’s hec-
toring letter I hear a guilt-ridden absentee
father claiming to enumerate his son’s flaws
It is easy to govern a kingdom but difficult to
rule one’s family. —Chinese proverb
but in fact enumerating his own. STC was
a procrastinator, constantly promising that
he was about to finish poems and essays he
hadn’t started. STC was a daydreamer, prone
to bumping into people, missing coaches, and
failing to recognize that the image in a mirror
was himself. STC talked too much. he once
grabbed the button of Charles Lamb’s coat
and wouldn’t stop talking. Lamb took out his
penknife and cut off the button.
In an early poem, STC wrote of hartley,
“Ah lovely Babe! In thee myself I scan.” Indeed he did. In hartley, he scanned his own
disorganization, his own irresponsibility, his
own meandering focus. And so did the rest of
his circle. Dorothy Wordsworth noted, “
hartley is as odd as ever, and in the weak points of
his character resembles his father very much.”
reading their letters, I often forget who’s
writing, since both so often begin with excuses
for not having written sooner—in STC’s case,
because of toothache, headache, insomnia, gout,
cough, boils, inflamed eyes, swollen testicles, and
“raging epistolophobia”; in hartley’s, because he
lost the letter to which he was replying, because
