Cook, Eliza (1818–1889)
Cook, Eliza (1818–1889)
English poet. Born on December 24, 1818, in South-wark, England; died at Wimbledon, England, on September 23, 1889; daughter of a London tradesman (brasier).
Eliza Cook grew up in London the youngest of 11 children. On her father's retirement in 1827, the family moved to a farm in Sussex. As a girl, the self-taught Cook contributed poetry to the Weekly Dispatch and New Monthly and, at 17, published Lays of a Wild Harp (1835). She published Melaia and other Poems in 1838, the same year that her poem "The Old Armchair" caught the fancy of working and middle-class readers on both continents, making her a household name. Written in memory of her beloved mother, the poem was known for a common-sensical domestic viewpoint that was considered unpretentious, moral, but never sentimental. Beginning in 1849, Cook edited and published Eliza Cook's Journal until the magazine failed in 1854; many articles in the magazine were republished in Jottings from My Journal (1860). Cook followed this with New Echoes and Other Poems (1864) and was given a civil list pension of £100 per annum (1863). Both her popularity and health declined in her later life and, for a number of years, she was an invalid. Her complete collected poems were published in 1870.