The Road to Nether Stowey

‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’ is our principal witness for events during Hazlitt&s;s visit to Nether Stowey and Alfoxden in late May 1798. Its popularity derives not just from what it reveals of Wordsworth and Coleridge at a vitally important moment in their creative lives, but from its ingeniously constructed myth of initiation into their work. For those reasons, we should be wary of accepting it as the final word on the events it describes. Take, for instance, the time-scale of Hazlitt&s;s stay: in the essay it seems to span only a few days, when in fact he was there for three weeks. And it is inconceivable that he failed to make the acquaintance of Berkeley Coleridge, born ten days prior to his arrival. Berkeley was described as possessing a ‘noble and lovely style of beauty, his large, soft eyes, of a “London-smoke” colour, exquisite complexion, regular features and goodly size’; his father was reported to have been ‘very proud of him’, showing him off to admirers, one of whom must have included Hazlitt. 1 Nor can he have failed to make friends with Hartley Coleridge, four months from his second birthday; in 1803 he would paint his portrait. 2 By all accounts, he got on with both of them such that Coleridge could tell Thomas Wedgwood that Hazlitt ‘is very fond of, attentive to, & patient with, children’. 3

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