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cyphomandraThere was a review in the June edition of Harper's Magazine whose opening section I've been meaning to post about since it makes me giggle every time I think about it. Also, it will hopefully prod me into tracking down the book, although it's more likely that it will just make me go looking for my copy of Tim Powers' The Stress of Her Regard... The review was by Evelyn Toynton, of The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge by Adam Sisman:
In December 1793, shortly after his twenty-first birthday, a lovesick, guilt-ridden scholarship student ran away from Jesus College, Cambridge, and fled to London.Samuel Taylor Coleridge was deeply in debt to his tutor, his violin teacher, his bookseller, and his wine merchant; the college authorities looked with disfavor on his radical politics; he had been neglecting his studies for months past; and he had convinced himself—somewhat prematurely, since he hadn’t asked her—that the object of his love would never marry him. In London he bought a lottery ticket, hoping to gamble himself out of debt, but his number failed to come up. So he gave away his last few pence to some beggars and enlisted in the Light Dragoons under a ludicrous name that nonetheless retained his own initials: Silas Tomkyn Comberbache.
His Majesty’s Army can rarely have welcomed so unpromising a recruit. He frequently fell off his horse as he tried to mount it; if he managed to land in the saddle, the animal would buck him off again, or bolt from the parade ground with him on its back. It even resisted his efforts at grooming it (Coleridge decided that horses should really be able to clean themselves). Nor could he keep his musket in order. Once, when the regiment’s carbines were laid out for inspection, the officer demanded, “Whose rusty gun is this?” Coleridge stepped forward. “Is it very rusty, sir?” he asked. “Because if it is, I think it must be mine.”
His fellow soldiers, impressed by his spectacular incompetence, got into the habit of taking over his chores. In return, he wrote their love letters for them, amazing their sweethearts with his eloquence, and entertained them with stories from Herodotus (they assumed that the Battle of Thermopyla must have been fought in the north of England a few years back). He also nursed a “poor Comrade” with smallpox through eight days and nights of delirium and fever. Still, it was unanimously felt that the sooner he and the army parted company, the happier everyone would be. Four months after his enlistment, his family scraped together the money to buy him out, in time for him to sit his next scholarship exam at Cambridge. The regiment’s muster roll records his emancipation with the words, “discharged S. T. Comberbache, Insane.”
In December 1793, shortly after his twenty-first birthday, a lovesick, guilt-ridden scholarship student ran away from Jesus College, Cambridge, and fled to London.Samuel Taylor Coleridge was deeply in debt to his tutor, his violin teacher, his bookseller, and his wine merchant; the college authorities looked with disfavor on his radical politics; he had been neglecting his studies for months past; and he had convinced himself—somewhat prematurely, since he hadn’t asked her—that the object of his love would never marry him. In London he bought a lottery ticket, hoping to gamble himself out of debt, but his number failed to come up. So he gave away his last few pence to some beggars and enlisted in the Light Dragoons under a ludicrous name that nonetheless retained his own initials: Silas Tomkyn Comberbache.
His Majesty’s Army can rarely have welcomed so unpromising a recruit. He frequently fell off his horse as he tried to mount it; if he managed to land in the saddle, the animal would buck him off again, or bolt from the parade ground with him on its back. It even resisted his efforts at grooming it (Coleridge decided that horses should really be able to clean themselves). Nor could he keep his musket in order. Once, when the regiment’s carbines were laid out for inspection, the officer demanded, “Whose rusty gun is this?” Coleridge stepped forward. “Is it very rusty, sir?” he asked. “Because if it is, I think it must be mine.”
His fellow soldiers, impressed by his spectacular incompetence, got into the habit of taking over his chores. In return, he wrote their love letters for them, amazing their sweethearts with his eloquence, and entertained them with stories from Herodotus (they assumed that the Battle of Thermopyla must have been fought in the north of England a few years back). He also nursed a “poor Comrade” with smallpox through eight days and nights of delirium and fever. Still, it was unanimously felt that the sooner he and the army parted company, the happier everyone would be. Four months after his enlistment, his family scraped together the money to buy him out, in time for him to sit his next scholarship exam at Cambridge. The regiment’s muster roll records his emancipation with the words, “discharged S. T. Comberbache, Insane.”
