termed “Fatherly Pride” and invited hartley to
highgate to celebrate his glorious future.
That future was short-lived. Within a year,
hartley lost his fellowship at oriel. The provost
and fellows of the college decided unanimously
that he was “not fit to be received permanently
into the Society.” hartley failed to attend chapel
regularly, stank of tobacco, and associated with
“bad company,” a term redolent of bums and
barmaids but that in fact referred to undergraduates from colleges other than oriel. Most serious,
wrote the provost, “he was often guilty of intemperance and came home in a state in which it
was not safe to trust him with a candle.” on one
occasion, the dean found him in the gutter.
The news hit STC, as he wrote a friend,
like “a peal of thunder from a cloudless sky.” he
screamed in his sleep and wept so profusely that when he awoke, his pillow
was wet with tears. his attempts to
intercede included a 1,617-word letter to the provost and fellows of oriel
that hartley was to copy, sign, and
send. he also wrote five drafts of a letter he planned to send to the provost
himself, in one of which, with spectacular irrelevance, he quoted fifteen lines
from “Frost at Midnight” and four
from Wordsworth’s “To h. C., Six
Years old.” In a frenzy of denial and
enabling that will be familiar to the
family of any alcoholic, he attempted
to draw a Jesuitical line between intemperance (in which he admitted
hartley occasionally indulged) and
the habit of intemperance (of which
he claimed hartley was innocent).
When I recently mentioned
hartley Coleridge to an English pro-
fessor at Yale, she said, “Ah yes, hart-
ley! Didn’t he lose his fellowship at
oriel?” And I thought how strange it
was that people who know little else
about hartley have somehow heard
of what STC’s friend harriet Mar-
tineau called “the great catastrophe,
the ruinous blow.”
I would like to interject a small reality
check. In the academic sphere, hartley did
better than his father, who dropped out of
Cambridge. he did better than Wordsworth,
who took his degree from Cambridge “with-
out distinction.” he did better than Southey,
who dropped out of oxford. And he did bet-
ter than Byron, who dropped out of Cam-
bridge, and Shelley, who was expelled from
oxford. hartley graduated—with a second!
191 years after the fact, why do we continue
to associate him with the loss of a job for
which he was unsuited? Might the memory
of this episode be less adhesive—and might
hartley have been more resilient—had his
father viewed it as a disappointment rather
than an apocalypse?
The first three Shiite imams: Ali with his two sons Hasan and Husayn,
illustration from a Qajar-dynasty-era manuscript, Iran, c. 1837.
