he had taken ill after wearing excessively thin
breeches in bad weather, because of, as he charm-
ingly put it, “a stupifying head-achey cold, which
sticks to me like a poor and homeless relation, in
spite of the broadest hints to depart.”
Was hartley a born procrastinator? or did
he grow into one because his father kept telling
him he was?
From hartley Coleridge to William Words- worth, May 16, 1815:
My dear Sir
Being now tolerably established a
Collegian, feeling my gown rather less
burthensome, and myself less strange, I
hasten to perform my promise of scribble-
lation, and to become my own historian.
When he wrote these lines from Merton
College, oxford, hartley was eighteen and as
absentminded as ever: the letter was written
to Wordsworth but mailed to Lamb. South-
ey described his nephew at this age as “very
short”—he was just over five feet—“with re-
markably strong features, some of the thick-
est and blackest eyebrows you ever saw, and a
beard which a Turk might envy.” Also, “awk-
ward by nature,” though possessed of an intel-
lect that “will soon overcome all disadvantages
that his exterior may incur, if he do but keep
the course.”
The course in question was oxford, and he
managed to keep it, immersing himself in the
classics and dazzling his friends with his con-
versation. A fellow student later recalled:
his extraordinary powers as a converser
(or rather a declaimer) procured for him
numerous invitations to what are called
at oxford ‘wine-parties’…he would hold
forth by the hour (for no one wished to
interrupt him) on whatever subject might
have been started—either of literature,
politics, or religion—with an originality
of thought, a force of illustration, and a
facility and beauty of expression, which I
question if any man then living, except his
father, could have surpassed.
hartley might have fared even better had
those gatherings been tea parties, not wine
parties. he was drinking seriously, a habit he
dated to the spring of 1816, when he failed
to win oxford’s newdigate Prize for English
verse. The loss made him feel, as he put it, that
“all my aims and hopes would prove frustrate
and abortive.” he turned to alcohol for consolation and, for the rest of his life, was unable
to turn away.
That same year, hartley’s father was moving
in the opposite direction by attempting to shake
his addiction to laudanum (opium dissolved in
alcohol, a commonly used painkiller). STC had
started taking opium more than two decades earlier in order to calm his sleep, among other reasons. It eventually provoked nightmares in which
he was clawed by monstrous talons, infected with
shameful diseases, and buried alive—although, in
a more innocent phase, it also provoked the sensuous vision of Xanadu memorialized in “Kubla
Khan” in 1797. “Kubla Khan” was not published
until 1816, the year that STC placed himself in a
kind of private rehab, under the care of a benevolent highgate doctor named James gillman, to
whom hartley teasingly referred as “
Doctissimus.” Dr. gillman dispensed STC’s laudanum,
of which he had consumed up to a quart a day,
in regulated doses. STC planned to stay for a
month. he stayed for eighteen years.
In 1819, at the age of twenty-two, hartley
received a second-class degree (the equivalent
of a magna) in literis humanioribus. he had
prepared for his examination during a summer
of furious study at Southey’s house in Keswick,
devoting himself so completely to his books
that he did not even take meals with his family,
though he occasionally appeared for tea attired
in a loose toga and slippers. Two months later,
he was elected with high distinction as a Probationer Fellow at oriel College. In his old school
in the Lake District, the boys huzza’d and the
headmaster proclaimed a holiday. When he
heard the news, STC overflowed with what he
