Claiming kindred? New letters by and about William Gilbert

Described by Robert Southey as ‘a man of brilliant genius & polishd manners who is deranged’, the poet and astrologer William Gilbert cut a striking and memorable figure. He was, however, hard to pin down, a characteristic captured in Joseph Cottle’s observation that Gilbert’s arrival in Bristol in 1795 was from ‘whence no one could tell, and he never told’. That same elusiveness holds true today. Although Paul Cheshire, Sue Thomas and Patricia Cline Cohen have shed important new light on Gilbert, much about him remains mysterious. This is particularly true of his movements after his sudden departure in summer 1798 from Bristol, where his associates included Southey, Cottle, Coleridge and Wordsworth. This essay draws on previously overlooked letters by Gilbert and William Roscoe to shed new light both on Gilbert’s activities in 1798 and afterwards, and on his post-1798 interactions with his contemporaries, particularly Robert Southey.