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Joseph Cottle, Robert Southey and the 1803 Works of Thomas Chatterton

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ORE Open Research Exeter TITLE With Certain Grand Cottleisms: Joseph Cottle, Robert Southey, and the 1803 Works of Thomas Chatterton AUTHORS Groom, N JOURNAL Romanticism DEPOSITED IN ORE 10 January 2013 This version available at http://hdl.handle.net/10036/4152 COPYRIGHT AND REUSE Open Research Exeter makes this work available in accordance with publisher policies. A NOTE ON VERSIONS The version presented here may differ from the published version. If citing, you are advised to consult the published version for pagination, volume/issue and date of publication Nick Groom ‘With certain grand Cottleisms’: Joseph Cottle, Robert Southey and the 1803 Works of Thomas Chatterton On 12 January 1803, Robert Southey wrote to (1798), but he had effectively retired from John Rickman with the news that he had finally bookselling by the time the Works of published his edition of the complete Works of Chatterton appeared.2 It was in fact the Thomas Chatterton. Now completed, the book commercial failure of Lyrical Ballads –towhich proved to be much to the satisfaction of the public were slow to respond – that had Southey’s co-editor Joseph Cottle: ‘Chatterton hastened the collapse of Cottle’s publishing is finished – with certain grand Cottleisms activities, with the result that he was gradually wherewith I shall make mirth for you when we selling his copyrights to T. N. Longman. The meet’.1 These ‘grand Cottleisms’ were not just Works of Chatterton was underwritten by uttered extempore: certain of them have Longman and produced as an act of charity for survived in letters, and they reveal not only the Chatterton’s surviving family – his sister, Mary impulses behind the edition and the ambitions Newton, and her daughter, also called of the two editors, but also suggest why this Mary – and it had, somewhat ironically, a far edition mattered so much, and why it was greater immediate impact than Lyrical Ballads. destined to be a significant document in making This was due in part to the considerable the Romantic myth of Chatterton. At the time, impetus the edition received from a public row the project confirmed Bristol’s position at the between Southey and Herbert Croft, author of centre of what would later be known as the Love and Madness (1780) waged in the pages of Romantic movement – Chatterton was the Monthly Magazine and the Gentleman’s considered to be a Bristolian, as were Southey Magazine (1799–1800).3 But the and Cottle, and completing the project had Southey-Cottle Works was also the earliest involved various members of the regional attempt to produce a comprehensive account of intelligentsia. The story of its inception, the Chatterton phenomenon that had been compilation, and publication presents, then, an haunting the literary world for a quarter of a alternative to narratives of the period that are century. The edition presented an opportunity focussed upon the poetic collaborations of to investigate Chatterton’s precocious – if William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor fatal – genius, and to examine the staggering Coleridge. range of his literary production. Chatterton Cottle is indeed best known as the publisher appealed because he was young, passionate, of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads wayward, and radical. His writings were 226 Romanticism similarly wild, ranging from intricate medieval predominantly unpublished or uncollected forgeries (the Rowley works) to vituperative pieces (including those texts used for William political satires – but how could the dreamy Barrett’s History and Antiquities of the City of imaginative richness of the Rowley world Bristol, 1789); much use is also made of Robert coexist with his extreme radicalism? Southey, Glynn’s bequest to the British Library.5 The the onetime Pantisocrat, was initially drawn to edition concludes with extracts from Edward Chatterton’s strange brew of medievalism and Gardner’s Miscellanies (1798), various letters political savvy, but it was Cottle’s tampering including one from Mary Newton on her emphasizing certain aspects of Chatterton’s brother admitting to writing various Rowley œuvre against others (the Rowley forgeries poems, and a bibliography of the Rowley against the political satires), that would help to Controversy compiled by Joseph Haslewood.6 mould the poet into an archetypal figure for a Annotation is very sparse, except in the Rowley new generation of writers. This edition was volume, and although Southey-Cottle is in no then the canonical Chatterton for the Romantic sense a variorum the footnotes here are period (Wordsworth and Coleridge were both collected from Tyrwhitt, Milles, Bryant, and subscribers to the edition), and was of Barrett, and from notices in newspapers and enormous influence in presenting for the first magazines.7 The edition is very fastidiously time the dizzying extent of Chatterton’s printed, particularly in this Rowley volume: for literary achievements – and it is revealing to example, a page of ‘Eclogue the Second’ has five discern the hand of Cottle in Southey’s strata of type – four lines of text, Chatterton’s high-minded project. footnotes, Tyrwhitt’s footnote, a note According to Donald Taylor, the 1803 continued from the previous page, and a further Southey-Cottle Works is of little interest footnote to that note.8 textually, ‘derived primarily from previous Ostensibly, Southey arranged the texts and editions, earlier printings, holographs still Cottle wrote a handful of explanatory essays, extant, and non-authoritative transcripts’, and but Cottle also seems to have done a it also tends to be inaccurate.4 Butitwasthe considerable amount of editing – not to mention first and until Taylor himself in 1971, the only bowdlerizing – himself; indeed, Cottle was attempt at a collected edition covering all of much more involved in publishing Chatterton Chatterton’s verse and prose. Southey and than he had been in the production of Lyrical Cottle published 32 authentic pieces for the first Ballads, to the extent that his values are time, and brought 45 previously printed pieces perhaps stamped on the edition far more into the canon; they also reproduced nine pieces deeply than those of his co-editor. This is how of doubtful authenticity (seven of which were the more conservative version of Chatterton as from the ‘Hunter of Oddities’ series) and an ineffable genius, barely of this world, erroneously printed two texts not by became delineated. In this, Cottle was assisted Chatterton. Including correspondence and by help received from such characters as memoirs, a total of 112 pieces were collected or George Catcott (associate – one might say printed for the first time. dupe – of the poet, and by then a professional The three volumes of the Southey-Cottle Chattertonian), Thomas Eagles (who had Works begin with George Gregory’s Life (1789) financed The Execution of Sir Charles and a reprint of Chatterton’s Miscellanies in Bawdin, 1772), and Edward Williams Prose and Verse (1778), volume two is drawn (a.k.a. the Welsh antiquarian and forger, Iolo from Jeremiah Milles’s edition of the Rowley Morganwg, who had transcribed Chatterton’s poems (1782), and volume three is father’s catch for three voices from the ‘With certain grand Cottleisms’ 227 European Magazine, 1792, reprinted in the instance, was first published in the European edition).9 Magazine for January 1792 (interestingly, the Never one to resist interfering, the copytext ultimately used by Cottle was from Pumblechookian Catcott had already taken it on Glynn’s collection). Haslewood also had himself to visit Chatterton’s sister Mrs Newton cuttings from the Gentleman’s Magazine, with a progress report: Monthly Review, Critical Review, European Magazine, Morning Post, St. James’s I have the pleasure of informing you, that Chronicle, Public Advertiser, and many other the Plan meets entirely her approbation; ephemeral publications, detailing the ebb and and that she expresses the most lively flow of the Controversy from 1778 to the Gratitude for the trouble you & your Friend present, and these arguments gathered against have taken in behalf of herself and the authenticity of Rowley proved 10 Daughter. indispensable for Cottle when he came to write his critical essays.14 Mary Newton herself wrote to Cottle a week It was probably the poet, literary later (25 March 1802): journeyman, and eccentric, Mr Catcott calld on me with the pleasing nankeen-pantalooned George Dyer who first news that Mr. Southey &c had determind made contact with Haslewood, acting as an 15 upon a plan of Publishing my Brothers emissary for the Bristol editors. Southey had works. You had purposed the present plan to asked Dyer to try and authenticate Chatterton’s me before you left Bristol and I coincided burletta The Revenge (first published in 1795), with it, and I do assure you Sir, it have my and following the advice of a bookseller, Dyer’s full approbation.11 trail led to Haslewood. Southey immediately paid him a visit, and Haslewood wrote to Dyer It almost sounds as if this has been dictated by on 18 June 1802: Catcott, but the most telling feature of this letter is that she asks for an advance of a Sir/ ‘few pounds’. She was ailing and impoverished; The MS Copy of the Revenge was purchased r r Longman and Rees forwarded £30. by M King of the late M Luffman The main collaborator on the project was Atterbury of Abingdon Westminster for Joseph Haslewood – antiquarian, editor, and 5 Guineas it was afterwards given to the late subsequent founder of the Roxburghe Club.12 John Egerton in order to be published and r Haslewood’s
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