Born in Christmas Eve of 1818 in the South-wark section of London, Eliza Cook found early success as a poet. She published her first collection while still a teenager in 1835. The verse featured in Lays of a Wild Harp found a receptive audience among what would tactfully be referred to at the time as readers with a less discriminating taste. Cook’s audience was not the refined peerage of the nobility who knew a good poet when told them so by someone the desired to emulate. Cook wrote for the working class lovers of verse who read for pleasure and appreciation rather than as a means of elevated their standing upon those at the night level of class distinction.
That audience was then—as now—broad and sweeping. Her poetry easily made the transition across the Atlantic to American sensibilities who found her every bit as appealing as the British working class. The robust reception awarded to that first collection opened opportunities for consistently accepted submissions to various popular magazines. One of her strongest supporters was the widely read Weekly Dispatch which published a number of subsequent works including that which could affirmatively be labeled her most well-known and beloved poem, “The Old Armchair.” With its publication in 1837, Eliza Cook effectively became one of the most famous poets in England by 1838.
The combination of being predominantly self-educated for the most part, constructing verses in clear and accessible language and taking as her subjects immediately recognizable domestic concerns such as her open expression of love for an worn, but prized armchair which slowly transforms into tribute not to the chair as much as to her mother who died while sitting in it all served to make Cook a poetess of the people at a time when British verse was starting to be defined by strange and exotic and unfamiliar and perhaps even terrifying figures like Shelley, Byron, Coleridge and even Keats. Cementing this hold on popular opinion was the success of her own Eliza Cook’s Journal from 1849 to 1954.
In 1870 she published a complete and comprehensive collection of all her poetry, but spent much of her later years a completely inactive invalid, living off a pension of 100 pounds a year. Eliza Cook died in Wimbledon, England in 1889, her popularity with the average reader having finally been eclipsed by the darlings of the academic set who had received a far less warm reception from the parents and grandparents of those who would help transform Shelley, Byron and the gang from the Sex Pistols of British verse to the Beatles of the Romantic poetry.
