Charles Cowden Clarke (1787-1877)

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Charles Cowden Clarke was born on 15 December 1787. His father John Clarke was headmaster of a private school in Enfield and the family home was adjacent to the school. Charles was a student there and began to assist his father as a teacher. He was known for radical politics and contemporaries were concerned that he passed on these ideas to his students, but he was remembered by them for his knowledge of literature and music.

At Enfield School he taught and became friends with John Keats and his mentorship influenced Keat’s development as a poet. He stopped teaching in around 1815 and moved to London, where he became part of literary, musical and theatrical circles. He was a lodger at the Novello family home at Shacklewell Green and brought literary figures into the Novello’s lives. He introduced them to their second lodger, Edward Holmes (1797-1859), who became Vincent Novello’s pupil as an organist and later became a music critic. He taught the Novello children and introduced them to English literature.

He became embedded in the Novello’s family life and was known to them as ‘Charley’. He was engaged to Mary Victoria Novello on 1 November 1826 and they married on 5 July 1828 at Bloomsbury Church. They lived initially with the Novellos at Craven Hill Cottage in Bayswater, where Charles pursued a career as a writer. In 1834 he began to give public lectures, which he continued for 20 years. He was considered to be particularly good at this role and spoke about a variety of literary subjects.

He moved to Nice with his wife and her brother (Joseph) Alfred Novello in 1856 and on to Genoa in Italy in 1861, where they lived at Villa Novello and continued to write and edit, both on his own and in collaboration with his wife, including important works on Shakespeare. He died on 13 March 1877 and is buried in Genoa.