1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Cook, Eliza

COOK, ELIZA (1818–1889), English author, was born on the 24th of December 1818, in Southwark, being the daughter of a local tradesman. She was self-taught, and began when a girl to write poetry for the Weekly Dispatch and New Monthly. In 1838 she published Melaia and other Poems, and from 1849 to 1854 conducted a paper for family reading called Eliza Cook’s Journal. She also published Jottings from my Journal (1860), and New Echoes (1864); and in 1863 she was given a civil list pension of £100 a year. As the author of a single poem, “The Old Armchair,” Eliza Cook’s name was for a generation after 1838 a household word both in England and in America, her kindly domestic sentiment making her a great favourite with the working-class and middle-class public. She died at Wimbledon on the 23rd of September 1889.