Miss Daubeny was a schoolfellow of Emma Isola's, at Dulwich.
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Page 50. In the Album of Mrs. Jane Towers.
Charles Clarke—in line 7—was Charles Cowden Clarke (1787-1877), a friend of the Lambs not only for his own sake, but for that of his wife, Mary Victoria Novello, whom he married in 1828 and who died as recently as 1898. Their Recollections of Writers, 1878, have many interesting reminiscences of Charles and Mary Lamb. Writing to Cowden Clarke on February 25, 1828, Lamb says:—"I had a pleasant letter from your sister, greatly over acknowledging my poor sonnet…. Alas for sonnetting,'tis as the nerves are; all the summer I was dawdling among green lanes, and verses came as thick as fancies. I am sunk winterly below prose and zero."
Mrs. Towers lived at Standerwick, in Somersetshire, and was fairly well known in her day as a writer of books for children, The Children's Fireside, etc.
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Page 50. In my own Album.
This poem was first printed in The Bijou, 1828, edited by William
Fraser, under the title "Verses for an Album."
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