'With certain grand Cottleisms': Joseph Cottle, Robert Southey and the 1803 Works of Thomas Chatterton

• Published in: Romanticism (Edinburgh) Vol. 15; no. 3; pp. 225 - 238
• Main Author: Groom, Nick
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: UK Edinburgh University Press 01.10.2009
• Subjects: Literary Studies
• ISSN: 1354-991X; 1750-0192
• DOI: 10.3366/E1354991X09000749

Joseph Cottle is best known as the publisher of Wordsworth and Coleridge's "Lyrical Ballads", but he had effectively retired from bookselling when his and Robert Southey's edition of the complete "Works of Chatterton" was published in 1803. This edition was the earliest attempt to produce a comprehensive account the Chatterton phenomenon which had haunted the literary world for 25 years, and the main thrust of the "Works" was that Chatterton was the sole author of the Rowley works. It was the opportunity to investigate Chatterton's precocious if fatal genius, and to show the staggering range of his writing, which included both the Rowley forgeries and savage political satires. Ostensibly, Southey arranged the texts and Cottle wrote some explanatory essays, but he also seems to have done much editing, plus bowdlerizing, and it was Cottle's tampering which emphasised some aspects of Chatterton's work (the Rowley forgeries) as against others (the satires), and thus shaped the poet as an archetypal figure for later writers. Despite its shortcomings, the Southey-Cottle edition succeeded in its main aim of bestowing charity on Chatterton's surviving family by producing a literary monument to him.