English: Faculty Publications

S. T. Coleridge, Joseph Cottle, and Some Bristol Baptists, 1794-96

Document Type

Contribution to Book

Publication Date

1-1-2010

Publication Title

English Romantic Writers and the West Country

DOI

10.1057/9780230281455

ISBN

9780230223745

Abstract

After Samuel Taylor Coleridge delivered one of his political lectures in Bristol in 1795, an observer noted that the speaker was to be praised for ‘disseminating that knowledge which so nearly concerns us all, that is, political’. ‘Undaunted by the storms of popular prejudice [and] unswayed by magisterial influence’, the writer argued, Coleridge had spoken ‘in public what none had the courage in this City to do before, — he told Men that they have Rights’ (Cumberland, 1795, 14). Not exactly. Radical political discourse had been prominent in Bristol for some time before Coleridge’s lectures. In fact, it is likely Coleridge’s lectures that year were attended by several individuals — all Dissenters and friends of Joseph Cottle, the Bristol printer and bookseller — who were already sympathetic to Coleridge’s politics. Even before his arrival in Bristol, Coleridge had been introduced to Baptist political radicalism during his time as a student at Jesus College in Cambridge. Thus, when Coleridge lectured in Bristol on the ‘rights of man’, the proper role of government, the evils of the slave trade, and the immorality of England’s war with France, he was participating in a rich tradition of West Country Dissent that had been ongoing in Bristol and Cambridge since 1775.

Comments

Georgia Southern University faculty member, Timothy Whelan authored, "S. T. Coleridge, Joseph Cottle, and Some Bristol Baptists, 1794-96."

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