From Romantics to 21st century radicals: Coleridge, Shelley and the roots of communal living – The Guardian

Friends who have lived in communes tell me the worst thing is the endless meetings. All those issues a household bickers into resolution who will sort the recycling, who finished the milk are decided by committee. Yet from Findhorn ecovillage in Moray to the co-housing community at Postlip Hall, in Gloucestershire, Britain has more than 400 intentional communities or communes, and in the post-Covid era theyre fielding more inquiries than ever.

Some people turn to co-housing to be able to afford a roof over their head. But many, according to the website of umbrella organisation Diggers & Dreamers, are looking for a more values-led, potentially unorthodox way of life. There are echoes of the 1960s and 70s experiments in communal self-sufficiency, when food was farmed organically, kids were home-schooled and some communities went entirely off-grid. But the roots of the movement go much further back than that.

In June 1794, Samuel Taylor Coleridge visited Oxford, and was introduced to a student poet, Robert Southey. A restless if brilliant Cambridge undergraduate, Coleridge was passing through on a summer walking tour to Wales, then in fashion for its rugged good looks. After a brief stay in Oxford, he pressed on to Snowdonia, returning through the Cambrian mountains. He turned out to be no great evoker of the picturesque: Gloucester is a nothing-to-be-said-about town. The women have almost all of them sharp noses.

But this hardly mattered, because his trip had become instead a chance to proselytise for a scheme the new friends had dreamed up. In a Montgomeryshire pub, for example, Coleridge claimed that two great huge fellows of butcher-like appearance danced about the room [shouting] God save the King! And may he be the last! Their republican outburst was a response to Coleridge regaling the pub with his idea for a radical community in which everything would be held in common, partly inspired by William Godwins recent Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Prefixing isocracy equal governing power for everyone with the universalising pan, the friends named their ideal Pantisocracy.

They had partly been inspired by William Godwins Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, published a year earlier. Godwin argued that a system of inequality produces 1 a sense of dependence, 2 the perpetual spectacle of injustice 3 the discouragement of intellectual attainments, 4 the multiplication of vice 5 depopulation. As befitted a future poet laureate, Southey waxed rather more lyrical when spelling out the benefits to an old schoolfriend: To go with my friends to live with them in the most agreeable and most honourable employment. To eat the fruits I have raised & see every face happy around me. My mother sheltered my brothers educated.

The 21-year-old Coleridge had little to lose, but he did make one major sacrifice for the project: giving up his great love, Mary Evans. Instead, marrying Sarah Fricker, he joined himself to a chain of Pantisocratic brothers-in-law as he, Southey and Robert Lovell, a fellow idealist and a largely unpublished poet, wedded a trio of sisters in the belief that this would cement their proposed community.

As in so many masculine utopias, however, they did not seek to transform womens roles. As Coleridge told Southey: The long helplessness of the babe is the means of our superiority in the filial and maternal affection It is likewise among other causes the means of society. Childcare, in other words, was a social building block and the touchstone that naturalised masculine superiority.

In the event, Coleridges sacrifice proved unnecessary. The Pantisocratics had already become markedly less fraternal by December 1794 when their plan, which was to found an ideal community in North America, foundered through lack of funds. They had imagined settling on the Susquehanna River, partly because of its excessive beauty and its security from hostile Indians: Pantisocratic rights clearly didnt extend to Indigenous peoples.

But six months in, Southey, as the schemes primary funder, was advocating a cheaper alternative. For Gods sake, my dear fellow, Coleridge hectored him, tell me what we are to gain by taking a Welsh farm. For this wasnt just downsizing. The new plan was for an agribusiness: Coleridge, Southey, Lovell, Burnett, and Co, some five men going partners together. Was this really compatible with the principles and proposed consequences of pantisocracy, Coleridge wondered.

A schism was on the way, and by late 1795, the Pantisocratic dream had been abandoned. We see the same sorts of questions being asked in intentional communities today, where many elders of the 1960s and 70s are now themselves in their 60s and 70s. Big old country houses no longer come cheap, and newer community members often go out to work, at least part time, to support their way of life. From the outside, at least, this looks like realism enabling idealism.

Such pragmatism as Coleridge and his fellow radicals mustered seems to have been directed towards seeding Pantisocratic ideals across society. This was an era when republican revolution in America and France had successfully challenged the established social order and proved it could be radically transformed, and they planned to model and to publish radical transformations of their own.

Another vertiginous social shift surrounded them. The turn of the 19th century saw the culmination of the process of enclosures that had incrementally cleared the subsistence farming peasantry from the countryside. Forced into cities, they became the labour that powered the Industrial Revolution. Todays countryside to which many Britons, freed by home working, wish to return is once again a contested space, at the cutting edge of climate change. Sustainable farming practices and radical land management, including rewilding, pull in one direction; agribusiness, post-Brexit needs for food security, even cottagecores inflated property prices, pull in another.

Despite Pantisocracys failure, the Romantic ideal of a better life in a community of like minds persisted. Coleridge went on to live in rural community with friends, first in Somerset, where he persuaded the Wordsworths to move, and then, following Southey and the Wordsworths, in the Lake District. In 1798 William Maddocks, a landowner committed to improvements, revived the idea of radical community in Wales and founded Tremadog in Gwynedd. Percy Bysshe Shelley lived here in 1812-13: he first called on William Godwin, and met his future wife Mary, Godwins daughter, while fundraising for the community. The Shelleys would go on to live in neighbourly community with Lord Byron and his entourage, and share houses with the Leigh Hunts and others.

In their first months together, Percy tried repeatedly to seduce the 16-year-old Mary into polyamory: most notably while travelling across the Napoleonic battlefields of Europe to Switzerland to found a polyamorous community, which failed through lack of money. Like the Pantisocratics, he seems to have believed that relationships with women could solidify radical community life. Shelley may have sincerely considered monogamy a form of ownership but personal convenience undermines such radicalism.

Intentional community by definition requires a degree of individual sacrifice. Coleridges heirs today are surely the all-in diggers and dreamers of Tipi Valley in Carmarthenshire, still using low-impact structures after 47 years, or, in Somerset, woodworkers at the off-grid community of Tinkers Bubble. They are living the balance between individual desires and collective good that is at the heart of the social contract.

Fiona Sampsons Starlight Wood: Walking back to the Romantic Countryside is published by Corsair.

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From Romantics to 21st century radicals: Coleridge, Shelley and the roots of communal living - The Guardian