The World’s Classics

CXIX

MARGARET CATCHPOLE

BY

RICHARD COBBOLD

OXFORD: HORACE HART

PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

THE HISTORY OF

MARGARET CATCHPOLE

A SUFFOLK GIRL

BY

RICHARD COBBOLD

WITH AN INTRODUCTION

BY CLEMENT SHORTER

HENRY FROWDE

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON, NEW YORK, TORONTO AND MELBOURNE

INTRODUCTION

Three personalities interest us in reading the novel of Margaret Catchpole—the author, the heroine, and the author’s mother, in whose service the real Margaret Catchpole was employed. Neither the author nor his mother has been the subject of much biographical effort, although Richard Cobbold was an industrious novelist, poet, and essayist for a long period of years, and wrote this one book that will always, I think, be read. His mother, Elizabeth Cobbold, made some reputation as a writer of verse, and is immortalized for us in Charles Dickens’s Mrs. Leo Hunter. Fortunately we have a sketch of her by one Laetitia Jermyn, dated 1825, and attached to a volume of Poems, published at Ipswich in that year.[1] Laetitia Jermyn tells us that Elizabeth’s maiden name was Knipe, and that she was born in Watling Street, London, about 1764, her father being Robert Knipe of Liverpool. In 1787 she published a little volume of verse entitled Six Narrative Poems, which she dedicated to Sir Joshua Reynolds, evidently by permission. It is clear that in girlhood she had made the acquaintance of the great painter. Her biographer says nothing about her being an actress, but it is a tradition in Ipswich that this was for a time her profession. In 1790 she was married at Liverpool to William Clarke, a Portman of the borough and Comptroller of the Customs of Ipswich, who was apparently about sixty years of age and in very delicate health. The sprightly young wife wrote the following lines to her husband on St. Valentine’s Day, soon after their marriage:—

I quote this valentine at length because it is a fair sample of the quality of our poet’s efforts. At the end of the eighteenth century, and far into the nineteenth, a rhyming faculty of this kind was quite sufficient to make a literary reputation in an English provincial town, and in the case of Mrs. Clarke it was followed up by the writing of a novel, The Sword, published at Liverpool in 1791. It is interesting to find the name of Roscoe the historian among the subscribers for this book. In the same year—within six months of her marriage—the writer lost her husband.

The interest of Elizabeth Knipe’s life, however, begins for us when very shortly after this she became the wife of John Cobbold, of the Cliff Brewery, Ipswich. Cobbold was a widower. He had already had sixteen children, of whom fourteen were then living. When it is remembered that by his second wife he had six more children it will be seen that there was a large family, and it is not surprising therefore that the Cobbold name is still very much in evidence in Norfolk and Suffolk, and particularly in Ipswich. “Placed in the bosom of this numerous family”, writes her biographer, “and indulged in the means of gratifying her benevolent and liberal spirit, ‘The Cliff’ became the home of her dearest affections, the residence of taste, and the scene of hospitality.” One need not complain of the lady that she was not very much of a poet, for she had otherwise a versatile character. In addition to being, as we are assured, a good housekeeper, she was, if her self-portraiture be accepted, a worker in many