BRISTOL BRANCH OF THE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION THE UNIVERSITY, BRISTOL Price £1.00 1987 JOSEPH COTTLE ISBN O 901388 48 3 OF BRISTOL l BASIL COTTLE BRISTOL BRANCH OF THE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION LOCAL HISTORY PHAMPHLETS Hon. General Editor: PATRICK McGRATH Assistant General Editor: PETER HARRIS , Joseph Cottle of Bristol is the sixty-fourth pamphlet to be pub­ lished by the Bristol Branch of the Historical Association. It is the JOSEPH COTTLE OF BRISTOL Fifth Annual Southey Lecture, and it was delivered by Dr Basil Cottle at Christ Church, City, Bristol on 2 June 1983. The Southey Lectures were promoted by the Rector and Church Council of Old My subject is a man whose one fame has been _that he pu_blished Bristol Parish (Christ Church with St. Ewen). They were intended the Lyrical Ballads at Bristol in 1798. By his generosity and to consider Bristolians who had made a major contribution to the farsightedness he enabled three acknowledged poets - the Laur­ Arts, Literature, Philosophy, Science, Politics and Religion. The eate Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Laureate Southey - to series was named after Robert Southey, who was baptized in practise their art while they were still P?Or yo1:1ng me�; but I hope Christ Church in 1774. to show that he had a hitherto unpublished life of his own, with The Branch wishes to acknowledge a very generous gift from an literary quarrels, a spectacular la suit, geology, a little chemistry, anonymous donor as well as a grant from the Publications Com­ "'. _ Broadmead Baptist Church and Zion Congregational Chur��, two mittee of the University of Bristol. lame legs, near-blindness, lung haemorrhages, the compos1t1on of The picture of Amos Simon Cottle is reproduced by kind more verse than has been composed by almost any other English permission of the National Portrait Gallery which holds the writer, and all the ups-and-downs of a life of 8� years. copyright. The picture of Zion Chapel, Bedminster, is reproduced Joseph Cottle was born in Barton Alley, Bnstol, on 9 March by kind permission of the City of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery. 1770, just before Chatterton's suicide and �ordsworth'� birt�. The letter from Joseph Cottle to Wordsworth's nephew Christ­ The family was one whose fortunes had gnevously declined; 1t opher is in the collection of Dr Basil Cottle, and the photograph derived, with its name, from the fort�fied manor of Cotehele was made by Mr Dennis Cutter, as was that of Lamb's caricature (Cornish for 'the wood by the river') on the Ta ar i Cornwall, of Joseph Cottle. � ? whence it spread through the South-West, leavmg its_ name at The cover illustration of Joseph Cottle c. 1810 is from the lost Cottles Barton in North Tawton, Devon, at Cottles Oak m Frame, miniature by Nathan Branwhite. The photograph is by Mr. Dennis Somerset at the manor called Cottles in Atworth, Wilts, and at Cutter. Frampto� Cottle (now misspelt Cotterell) in Gloucestershire. In The Pamphlet Appeal Fund, which is designed to put the series the female line it produced the Earls of Mount Edgcumbe and the on a sound financial basis, is still open and readers are invited to French poet Frarn;:ois de Malherbe, �ho ori�inate? the Alexan­ contribute. All donations, however small, will be of help. They drine verse; but, having once been kmghtly, 1t lost its wealth and should be sent to Peter Harris, 74 Bell Barn Road, Stoke Bishop, importance, backed the wrong horses in the Civil War, suffered at Bristol BS9 2DG. Cheques should be made payable to the Bristol least one luckless spendthrift, and was by the 18th century reduced Branch of the Historical Association. to trade, tenant farming, labour, and even, in time, university The next pamphlet in the series will be by Peter Harris and will lecturing. Its eclipse can best be illustrated in the Re�d. John examine the various railway schemes in nineteenth-century Bristol Skinner's Journal of a Somerset Rector 1803-1834, published ?Y which never in fact came to fruition. the Oxford University Press in 1984; here members of the family A list of pamphlets still in print is given on the inside back cover. are among the worst sluts and rogues of the parish of Camerton, They can be obtained from most Bristol booksellers, from the where by 1120 their ancestors had been Lords o! the Man?r. shop in the City Museum, from the Porter's Lodge in the Wills Cottle in later life toyed with a signet that sealed his letters with Memorial Building or direct from Peter Harris. the family crest, out of a crest-coronet or, a le�pard sejant argen_t, but there is no sign that even he presumed to display the emphatic © shield, or, a bend gules. ISBN O 901388 48 3 Basil Cottle 1 His father, Robert Cottle, was a merchant clothier from Trow­ as bookseller, printseller, stationer and binder, on the corner bridge, who had come to the city parish of St.John, Bristol, and diagonally opposite Christ Church, City, Bristol. He was already there combined a family of eight with ill-luck in business; Mrs writing poetry, of some abundance but of small merit, the b�st so Cattle's cousin Anne Steele wrote the hymn 'Father, whate'er of far being his Monody on the death of Henderson, the fourth lme of earthly bliss'.The family were respectable and pious, though some which - 'Shall I not praise thee? Scholar! Christian! Friend!' - was of the Cottles in Bristol were more interesting: one Anne Cottle admired by Charles Lamb.A couple of these earl'y poems suggest was transported for 14 years as a receiver in 1771; a Grant Cottle a youthful romance out at Tockington, but they are pretty in the same year got the death sentence, commuted to transport­ conventional, the girl is dead, no other love will tear the image of ation, for gagging his aunt and rifling her house; and in 1786 an his late sister Eliza from his head ...and he remained a dedicated executed malefactor 'used to keep company with James Cottle, bachelor. who was called Charley the Flat'.A year after Joseph's birth, the When the shop opened, his father had just endured the worst of family moved to the corner of St James's Barton, with a business his several bankruptcies, but Cottle was off to a prosperous start. of 'Tailor and Draper'; it must have prospered sufficiently for the In addition to novels, religious and political tracts, sermons, children to receive decent educations, and when he was eight anti-slavery literature, and the eleven volumes of Poets of Great Joseph entered Richard Henderson's school at Hanham, where he Britain, he was selling pills and other remedies in the so-called found leisure to be tossed by a cow and to spend twelve hours 'Medical Warehouse' on the premises: Jackson's Infallible Oint­ unconscious after falling from a sycamore.Also, while the school ment for the Itch, Simson's Infallible !Ethereal Tincture for were bathing in the Avon one sunny afternoon, two boys were Toothache, Thomas's Tolu Essence for Consumption, and drowned during a game of ducking, and the classics master, young Young's Dew Balls for blacking shoes against the wet. But t�at John Henderson, going to the rescue, almost sank because his corner of High St and Corn St was about to become, for a bnef pockets were full of books. The school closed abruptly. couple of years, the most important bookshop in England. This John Henderson - who was teaching Latin and Greek in a Now that he had both funds and some leisure, his mind was Welsh college at the age of twelve - was the firstobject of Cattle's exercised by the subject of slavery; not only black slavery in our admiration, and indeed he always retained a proper respect for colonies, but the tragedy of factory children, as young as six, scholarship and talent. Henderson, although he died young as an carted off to work in the factories of the North, and of hapless little opium and astrology addict, put Cottle on to the right course of London milliners working eighteen hours a day, even on the reading, and sensibly advised him to become a bookseller. Sabbath, for the whims of fashion - he calls them 'half-forgotten Meanwhile, Cattle's elder brother Amos was being p�ivately instruments/Of ballroom splendour'. He was moved by individual educated in various parts of England, right up to a degree at suffering, too; in 1793, the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Cambridge, and by his association with the Clapham Sect and with Richard Savage, he visited the room in our Newgate prison where Henry Thornton, the anti-slavery agitator, influenced Joseph the poet had died, and wrote an elegy to him in pencil on th� w�ll. strongly against slavery. The sisters were at the school kept by Now, too, he started his career as a benefactor, by champ1onmg Hannah More and her sisters, whereafter the Cottle girls opened a ( against Hannah More) poor Anne Yearsley, the milkwoman fashionable school of their own.For them, Coleridge devised the poetess; by pecuniary assistance he was able to place her 'once harsh simile 'doleful as ...the Miss Cottles'.Their father's house more in a state of comfort'. Before he was twenty-four, his name was the resort of interesting people: an African prince from Sierra was on the subscription list for distressed Spitalfields weavers, Leone; Charles Wesley's daughter; the Revd.James Newton, who militiamen's shoes, an asylum for orphan girls.