Robert Lovell

Born in Bristol in 1771, he came from a prosperous Quaker family and is known as an English poet of the 1790s. His best-known work, Bristol: A Satire, attacked the city’s merchants and condemned their connection to the slave trade, giving his writing a strongly moral and political edge.

He moved in the same youthful literary world as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, and joined them in the famous Pantisocracy plan, an unrealized dream of building a more equal community in America. He married Mary Fricker in 1794, another link in the close-knit Bristol circle around those writers.

His life was short: he died in 1796, still in his twenties. Even so, he remains an interesting figure in the background of early Romanticism, both for his reforming spirit and for the company he kept.