Eliza Cook

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EC was a highly popular poet, journalist, and editor of the mid-nineteenth century, whose songs in particular circulated very widely: set to music, performed in drawing-rooms, reprinted in single sheets, and collected in manuscript. Her verse often seems to speak for the middle-class majority: patriotic, nostalgic, conservative about specific issues and in love with vague ideas of chivalry, valour, and sacrifice. In other poems, however, some written for specific occasions, she reflects a concern for the underprivileged or oppressed. Her prose journalism, while understood by some to presage the format of the ladies' magazine, also manifests an ongoing commitment to the levelling up
Robinson, Solveig C. “Of ’Haymakers’ and ’City Artisans’: The Chartist Poetics of Eliza Cook’s Songs of Labor”. Victorian Poetry, Vol.
39
, No. 2, pp. 229-53.
229
of the poorer classes and the improvement of the lot of women. Understood in her day as an influential social reformer with a Journal boasting a very impressive circulation, EC has disappeared from discussions of working-class and Chartist writing.
Photograph of a head-and-shoulders painting of Eliza Cook by William Etty, c. 1845. She is shown with her head turned to the side, wearing a red jacket over a white blouse with a large lace collar and a mauve bow tied in the centre. Her dark hair, smooth on top and centre-parted, hangs in loose ringlets around her face.

Milestones

24 December 1812

EC was born at 6 London Road, Newington, London.
The parish records show her birth on this day, and her baptism at St Mary's Church, Newington, on 3 February 1813. Until relatively recently, her year of birth has routinely been given in reference books as 1818.
Murray, Elizabeth. Email about Eliza Cook to Isobel Grundy.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder.
Murray, Elizabeth. Email about Eliza Cook to Isobel Grundy.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

1837

EC published in the Weekly Dispatch her best-loved sentimental poem, The Old Arm-Chair, about the death of her mother.
Armstrong, Isobel et al., editors. Nineteenth-Century Women Poets. Clarendon Press.
359

5 May 1849-25 November 1854

EC edited and wrote much of Eliza Cook's Journal, a wide-ranging middle-class feminist weekly.
OCLC WorldCat. http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.

23 September 1889

EC died at her home at Beech House, 23 Thornton Hill, Wimbledon, Surrey.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder.

Biography

Family and Early Life

24 December 1812

EC was born at 6 London Road, Newington, London.
The parish records show her birth on this day, and her baptism at St Mary's Church, Newington, on 3 February 1813. Until relatively recently, her year of birth has routinely been given in reference books as 1818.
Murray, Elizabeth. Email about Eliza Cook to Isobel Grundy.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder.
Murray, Elizabeth. Email about Eliza Cook to Isobel Grundy.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

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