Eliza Cook

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Standard Name: Cook, Eliza
Birth Name: Eliza Cook
Pseudonym: E. C.
Pseudonym: C.
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
qtd. in
Robinson, Solveig C. “Of ’Haymakers’ and ’City Artisans’: The Chartist Poetics of Eliza Cook’s Songs of Labor”. Victorian Poetry, Vol.
39
, No. 2, 2001, 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.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Elizabeth Braddon
The novel engages energetically with contemporary life, offering insight into the sporting set and the anxiety which greeted women's participation in hunting and interest in horse racing. MEB 's sense of the interweaving of human...
Intertextuality and Influence Harriet E. Wilson
A number of HEW 's epigraphs to chapters remain untraced, and some may be her own work. Those identified bear witness to considerable reading: among English writers she quotes Shelley , Byron , Eliza Cook
Literary responses Elizabeth Barrett Browning
EBB 's reputation fell sharply after the turn of the century. Virginia Woolf wittily remarked in the 1930s: fate has not been kind to Mrs Browning as a writer. Nobody reads her, nobody discusses her...
Literary responses Charlotte Maria Tucker
The Athenæum proclaimed, a more entertaining and salutary story for merry, scatter-brained, careless children has rarely been put on paper.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
1843 (1863): 261
The Dictionary of Literary Biography places this among CMT 's charming and...
Reception Isabella Banks
By the age of twenty-one IB was a poetess of some local repute in and around Manchester.
qtd. in
Burney, Edward Lester. Mrs. G. Linnaeus Banks. E. J. Morten, 1969.
32
Her biographer E. L. Burney notes that both Eliza Cook and Christina Rossetti corresponded with her...
Textual Features Eliza Meteyard
A contribution by EM to Howitt's Journal in 1847, a short story called The Angel of the Unfortunate, features a Paris foundling who grows to be a female anatomist and ministers to prostitutes morally...
Textual Production Caroline Frances Cornwallis
This book came out of CFC 's long held sentiment that the current treatment of children needed to be corrected.
Cornwallis, Caroline Frances. Selections from the Letters of Caroline Frances Cornwallis. Editor Power, M. C., Trübner and Co., 1864.
202, 204-5
The Ragged School Union had been founded in 1844 to promote education for...
Travel Matilda Hays
In the summer of 1850, Cushman got word that her close friend and former partner,
Merrill, Lisa. When Romeo Was a Woman. University of Michigan Press, 1999.
167
Eliza Cook , was terribly ill. It is possible that MH accompanied Cushman back to England. Once Cook's...

Timeline

28 September 1839: The Chartist Circular began publication in...

Building item

28 September 1839

The Chartist Circular began publication in Glasgow, under the auspices of the Universal Suffrage Central Committee for Scotland .
Royle, Edward. Chartism. Longman, 1980.
127
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Yan, Shu-chuan. “’When Common Voices Speak’: Labour, Poetry and Eliza Cook”. Women’s Writing, Vol.
22
, No. 4, Nov. 2015, pp. 428-54.
435

1845: American Charlotte Cushman made a sensation...

Building item

1845

American Charlotte Cushman made a sensation at her debut on the English stage as Bianca in Henry Hart Milman 's Fazio at the Princess's Theatre.
Markus, Julia. Across An Untried Sea: Discovering Lives Hidden in the Shadow of Convention and Time. Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.
13
Leach, Joseph. Bright Particular Star. Yale University Press, 1970.
188-9

Texts

Cook, Eliza. Diamond Dust. F. Pitman, 1865.
Cook, Eliza. Eliza Cook’s Journal. John Owen Clarke.
Cook, Eliza. Jottings from My Journal. Routledge, Warne, and Routledge, 1860.
Cook, Eliza. Lays of a Wild Harp. John Bennett and E. Spettigue, 1835.
Cook, Eliza. Melaia. R. J. Wood Dispatch Office, 1838.
Cook, Eliza. Melaia. J. and H. G. Langley, 1844.
Cook, Eliza. New Echoes, and Other Poems. Routledge, Warne, and Routledge, 1864.
Cook, Eliza. Poems. Simpkin, Marshall, 1845.
Cook, Eliza. Poems. 5th ed., Simpkin, Marshall, 1848, 3 vols.
Cook, Eliza, and Miss L. B. Humphrey. The Old Arm-Chair. D. Lothrop, 1886.
Cook, Eliza. The Poems of Eliza Cook. Leavitt.
Cook, Eliza. The Poetical Works of Eliza Cook. F. Warne, 1870.