Joseph Cottle and Reminiscence: The Picturesque Gone Awry

Abstract

On a fine Saturday morning in April 1795 Joseph Cottle departed early from Bristol for what seemed likely to be an ideal picturesque tour: Bristol to Chepstow, a light pub lunch at the Beaufort Arms, a glorious afternoon walk through the famous beauty spots of the Piercefield estate, and on to Tintern for the Abbey, followed by supper and lodgings in the village. What made the prospect so promising was his choice of walking companions: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and Sara and Edith Fricker. However, the tour was beset by problems: a late start, quarrelsome companions, Cottle’s lameness and need for a horse, culminating in the party becoming completely lost in the woods between Piercefield and Tintern – a tour gone awry. This essay recounts the problems of the tour, and Cottle’s heroic efforts to rescue it both in personal and aesthetic terms. As a piece of autobiographical writing, his reminiscence shows the syncretic nature of memory as he recollects profuse charged moments. Out of this series of transitory interactions with the landscape, culminating in the near panic of losing one’s way in the dark, Cottle nonetheless records a brief account of the interpersonal impossibility of the Pantisocracy scheme, and creates a portrait of Coleridge that functions as a miniature, capturing ‘essential’ aspects of his character. Such revealed patterns constitute Cottle’s biographical method as he offers us individuals in extremis, and invites us to witness their subjectivity as a series of fluid responses to circumstance. ‘Character’, for Cottle consists in the patterns of such responses over time. Emerging out of a deep conviction in the purposefulness of sensibility, Cottle provides detailed accounts allowing us to take the emotional temperature of the scenes, so to speak. When first published, his selection of specific anecdotes generated suspicion amongst the Coleridge family and executors who read for allegorical content (a paranoid hermeneutics). Their position – that the biographer was betraying his subject by revealing too much, or was score-settling – reveals their deep attachment to this reading strategy. Coleridge, the sage of Highgate, was already an allegorical personage of their making, and they resisted any effort to destabilise their favoured tableau. I hope to show that despite the inevitability of such allegorical readings, Cottle’s portrait trades primarily in inchoate moments of becoming, outside the rigidity of any stable tableau, and I want to suggest that it deserves our attention as an account of the shape and shaping of subjectivity. To return to the walk: the party had arrived in good time to Chepstow and dinner at the