Abstract
AbstractRobert Lovell (1771‐1796) is known chiefly as one of the apostles of the ill‐fated Pantisocratic emigration scheme conceived by Coleridge and Southey. This essay considers Lovell's life and work in their own right. It establishes the biographical facts and builds a portrait of his character and personality. With reference to recent work on the importance of literary coteries, it re‐evaluates Lovell's role in Joseph Cottle's circle and in the cultural life of eighteenth‐century Bristol. It also undertakes a fresh assessment of Lovell's own poetry, with a particular focus on his treatment of his home city in Bristol: A Satire (1794).
Highlights
Introduction ‘At the close of the year 1794, a clever young man, of the Society of Friends, of the name of Robert Lovell, who had married a Miss Fricker, informed me that a few friends of his from Oxford and Cambridge, with himself, were about to sail to America, and, on the banks of the Susquehannah, to form a Social Colony, in which there was to be a community of property, and where all that was selfish was to be proscribed.’[1] wrote Bristol publisher Joseph Cottle in his Reminiscences published in 1847
As any serious student of Romanticism knows, the most important of those ‘few friends’ mentioned by Cottle were Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who were gathering support for a small-scale transatlantic emigration scheme founded on radical egalitarian or so-called ‘Pantisocratic’ principles
How much do we know about Robert Lovell? What kind of person was he? Why did Southey, and subsequently Coleridge, embrace him enthusiastically on first acquaintance and later downgrade their estimate of his qualities? What was Lovell’s achievement as a poet, and what was his place in the early history of Romanticism in the South West? In this essay I attempt to answer these questions by reexamining established ‘facts’, gathering fresh evidence, and treating Lovell and his poetry as valid subjects in their own right rather than as a footnote to the budding careers of Coleridge and Southey
Summary
In the only complete letter of his to Lovell that has survived, Southey transcribes for him a poem he has just written (‘The Exiled Patriots’) on two Scottish reformers recently tried for sedition and sentenced to transportation; the clear presumption is that Lovell will appreciate what he describes as a ‘delectable dose of democracy’ and share his dismay at the fate of the ‘virtuous exiles’.27 In September 1794, with Lovell enlisted as a Pantisocrat, Coleridge sends his new acquaintance ‘fraternal Love’ in plain allusion to the French Revolutionary slogan.[28]
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