The Gang of Three

Adam Sisman begins his story of one of the most famous friendships in literary history with the vivid account of a young man who, having already walked 40 miles, takes a short-cut across a Dorset cornfield, running to greet two people working in their garden. The young man is Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the friends are William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. Over the ensuing six years the three were rarely parted for long.

Their rambles together in the Quantocks are legendary. The two poets talked incessantly, declaiming their new poems, completing each other’s verses, planning a utopian community and a world ruled by reason, intoxicated by the ideals of the French Revolution — which was welcomed even by mainstream opinion in Britain, to start with, as extending to the continent those rights and liberties which the British have always fondly imagined that they themselves enjoy. Then, when radicals and dissenters began rattling the bars and demanding social changes which went further than the British establishment tolerated, there was a violent crackdown, like a ‘war on terror’. Wordsworth and Coleridge were spied upon in their rambles by security men who reported that they wrote things down in notebooks and talked in funny accents and that one of them cohabited with a woman who passed as his ‘sister’ — a common euphemism for mistress.

Actually, the relationship of Wordsworth with his sister Dorothy really was extra- ordinary. Necessarily, given the remit of this book, it is only a subplot. In a word, she adored him, and they behaved more like lovers than like siblings. She was hot-eyed, sensitive, passionate and uninhibited. When he went away for a few days she mourned over his discarded half-eaten apple. He managed to get married, to a plain, ‘sweet-tempered’ woman, whose sweet temper must have been as phenomenal as the suppressed hysteria of the two Wordsworths.