Cottle's Bristol Album, ‘Evening’ and the ‘Insane Man at Dr Fox's’

Joseph Cottle started his Bristol Album in 1795, recognizing the promise of his new circle of friends. Among those who contributed poems to this album were Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth, William Gilbert, Dr Beddoes, and the anonymous author of a poem ‘Evening’, described in the album as ‘Written by an Insane Man at Dr Fox's’. ‘Evening’ appears in the album immediately before a contribution in Coleridge's hand, and it has a number of verbal parallels with ‘The Eolian Harp’, which Coleridge was to start two months later. Dr Edward Long Fox, who in 1795 played a leading role in Bristol's radical community, was a medical practitioner who treated the mentally ill. This paper looks at how the poem was transmitted from the privacy of Fox's asylum to the pages of Cottle's album, and assesses its significance for that early Romantic writing circle.

Whose Memories?

This chapter explores the legacy of Edward Long, plantation owner, politician, pro-slavery activist and famed historian of eighteenth-century Jamaica. Slave-owners have until recently been for the most part ignored in the mainstream of British history, yet over centuries they made significant contributions to Britain’s wealth, politics and culture. Long, one of the most articulate protagonists of racial hierarchies, came from a family of Jamaican slave-owners who were prominent in the defence of what they saw as the rights of freeborn Englishmen, the right to hold others enslaved. His practice of disavowal, knowing and not knowing the humanity of Africans, has remained central to racial thinking into the present.