Clarke, CHARLES AND MARY COWDEN

Clarke, CHARLES AND MARY COWDEN, one of the most amiable among the pairs of English writers. Charles was born 15th December 1787, at Enfield, Middlesex, where his father kept a school at which Keats was a pupil. His name is imperishably linked with the dawning genius of the poet—but seven years younger than himself—who in a poetical epistle (1816) addresses Clarke as 'you who first taught me all the sweets of song.' He early imbibed a passion for the theatre, and after his parents' retirement to Ramsgate, continued to pay frequent visits to London, where he formed the friendship of Leigh Hunt, Shelley, Hazlitt, Charles and Mary Lamb. After his father's death in 1820, he became a bookseller in London, and ere long partner as music publisher with Alfred Novello, whose sister, Mary Victoria (born 1809), he married in July 1828. A year later Mrs Cowden Clarke began her famous Concordance to Shakespeare's Plays, published after sixteen years' toil in 1845. The married life of the pair was exceptionally happy, and they enjoyed the warm friendship of most London men of letters, from Lamb and Hazlitt down to Douglas Jerrold, Macready, and Charles Dickens. In 1834 Clarke began that twenty years' course of public lectures on Shakespeare and other dramatists and poets which brought him so much celebrity and profit. He read admirably, and put the fruit of much sound study and profound thought into the preparation of the lectures. Some of his courses of lectures were published, as his Shakespeare Characters, chiefly those Subordinate (1863), and Molière Characters (1865). In 1859 he published Carmina Minora, a volume of fair original verse, and in 1863 he edited the poems of George Herbert. The joint productions of the pair were the valuable Shakespeare Key (1879); an edition of Shakespeare's works with good if somewhat verbose annotations (1869), now re-issued as Cassell's Illustrated Shakespeare; and Recollections of Writers (1878), a charming and genial book, full of reminiscences of Keats, Lamb, and other famous men. In 1856 they went to live at Nice, but removed in 1861 to Genoa, where Charles died, 13th March 1877. Mrs Cowden Clarke, who died at Genoa, 12th January 1897, alone wrote novels, volumes of verse, &c.—the best known being The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines (1850) and World-noted Women (1857). See her Sketch of her husband (1887) and an Autobiographic Sketch (1897).