Chapter 1 - Joseph Cottle

Summary

“Joseph Cottle: Recollection, Reminiscence and the Forms of Circulation” begins with Cottle’s 1795 walk from Bristol to Tintern with Coleridge, Southey and the Fricker sisters (soon to be their wives). From this particularly fraught picturesque tour (they quarrelled and became lost in the dark), the chapter discusses Cottle’s portraits of Bristol and its ‘geniuses’ as recorded in Reminiscences of S.T. Coleridge and Robert Southey, the book from which the Tintern walk is drawn, and then moves to a discussion of the activity around and production of The Cottle Album the commonplace book inscribed with poems by his friends in the upstairs room of his Bristol bookshop in 1795 – 6. The chapter concludes with analysis of Cottle’s correspondence with Southey, including on the difficult and emotional subject of Coleridge’s opium addiction, and especially of the descriptions of their unrealized future tours.