author
Eliza Cook
1818–1889
A popular Victorian poet with a strong reforming voice, Eliza Cook wrote warmly about working people, education, and freedom. Her poem “The Old Armchair” made her a household name in Britain and the United States.
1 Audiobook
The Old Arm-Chair
by Eliza Cook
About the author
Born in Southwark in 1818, Eliza Cook was largely self-educated and began writing verse as a teenager. Her first collection, Lays of a Wild Harp, appeared in 1835, and poems including “I’m Afloat” and “The Star of Glengarry” soon established her reputation.
Cook became closely associated with the Chartist movement and used poetry to speak about political reform, shorter working hours, child labor, and women’s freedom. Her accessible style and belief in self-improvement through education made her especially popular with working-class readers.
From 1849 to 1854, she wrote and published Eliza Cook’s Journal, later collecting some of its prose in Jottings from My Journal. She received a Civil List pension in 1863 and continued to be widely represented in nineteenth-century poetry anthologies until her death in Wimbledon in 1889.