In the spring of 1796, a young Cambridge graduate named Charles Valentine Le Grice moved down to Cornwall to become a tutor. His friends were dismayed. Le Grice had prospects. He was close to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Charles Lamb. He also had a sweetheart in London. “Le Grice is gone to make puns in Cornwall,” Lamb wrote to Coleridge. “He has cut Miss Hunt completely: the poor girl is very ill on the occasion; but he laughs at it.”
The job in Cornwall sounded rotten: a sickly boy on an estate called Trereife, just outside the fishing harbor of…
