Joseph Cottle

Joseph Cottle (1770-1853) grew up in the Baptist congregation at the Pithay, Bristol, the son of Robert and Sarah Cottle. James Newton, the assistant pastor at the Pithay and a tutor at the Baptist Academy, lived in the Cottle home for nearly thirty years before his death in 1789. Cottle was also a frequent attendant at the Baptist church in Broadmead and was for over forty years a member of the Committee of the Bristol Education Society, which oversaw the work of the Academy. In November 1800, after the death of his father, who had been a deacon for many years in the church at the Pithay, Joseph, along with his mother and sisters, left the Pithay church and became attendants and later members of the Baptist and Independent congregations at Broadmead. In March 1830, when a separate church record book was begun for the Independent congregation at Broadmead, Joseph Cottle was listed as one of the deacons (the initial pages of the MS. are in Cottle’s hand). In December 1832, however, after many years at Broadmead, Joseph and his sister Mary were dismissed to the Zion Chapel (Independent) in Bedminster, where they were living at that time. Joseph’s brother, Thomas, lived for a while at Bath and then moved to London, where he subscribed to the BMS in 1800-1801 and in 1804-1805. Joseph Cottle is best known for publishing Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s first book of poems in 1796, early volumes of Robert Southey poems, as well as the initial copies of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads in 1798. A voluminous poet himself, Cottle is best known for his Early Recollections; Chiefly Relating to the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, during his Long Residence in Bristol (2 vols; 1837), and his slightly revised version, Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey (1847). See Broadmead Records, 1779-1817, Bd/M1/3, and Broadmead Independent Church Book 1830, Bd/M2/2, Bristol Record Office; Henry B. Cozens, The Church of the Vow: A Record of Zion Congregational Church, Bedminster, Bristol, 1830-1930 (Bristol, 1930), 53-54; Baptist Annual Register, 3:306; Periodical Accounts, 2:204; 3:132; Timothy Whelan,  “Joseph Cottle the Baptist,” Charles Lamb Bulletin, N.S. 111 (2000), 96-108.