Introduction

Abstract

Although they almost certainly met at Bristol in the summer of 1795, the close friendship between Wordsworth and Coleridge began in the summer of 1797 when Coleridge leaped over a gate and bounded across a pathless field’ to Racedown (LY, IV, 719 [III, 1263]),¹ the house in Dorset where Wordsworth was living with his sister Dorothy. By this time Wordsworth’s youthful adventures in France were well behind him. His involvement with the French Revolution had been complicated by his liaison with Annette Vallon, who became an ardent royalist. When his uncles stopped sending him money he was forced to leave France, leave Annette and his baby daughter, Caroline, and return to England. His disillusionment, first when England failed to support the revolution and then when he realised the full horrors of the atrocities committed by it, pushed him to the verge of mental breakdown. A legacy of £900 from his friend Raisley Calvert allowed him to rejoin Dorothy and regain some peace of mind in the tranquillity of the West Country. Coleridge, too, had virtually finished with his dreams of setting up a democratic republic on the shores of the Susquehanna with a group of friends, including his future brother-in-law, Robert Southey.