On 9 April 1791, Felix Farley's Bristol Journal carried an advert for a new bookseller; the premises were at the corner of High Street and Corn Street in Bristol, at the junction of the city's four chief commercial streets. For sale would be a ‘very large and beautiful Assortment of MODERN PRINTS, which will be rendered at the London prices’, amongst other items of the sort usually found in booksellers’ shops. As the first advert for a new business there is little to indicate just how important its precociously young proprietor, the 21-year-old Joseph Cottle, would become to the literary culture not only of Bristol, but of Britain. Within four years of beginning as a bookseller, Cottle would have established himself at the centre of one of the most important literary circles of his generation, one which would include at various times Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Robert Lovell, Charles Lamb, William ‘Hurricane’ Gilbert, Thomas Beddoes, Humphry Davy and Ann Yearsley.

But why did such an influential group of people with radical sympathies come together in Bristol? A chance meeting in Oxford saw the start of the friendship between Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge; and Southey's acquaintance with fellow-Bristolian Robert Lovell brought Southey and Coleridge into contact with Cottle. Other fortuitous circumstances occurred to bring Thomas Beddoes, William Wordsworth and Humphry Davy to Bristol and, through various acquaintances, into the circle developing around Cottle.