[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:—
Eliza to William this Valentine sends,
While ev’ry good wish on the present attends;
And freely she writes, undisturb’d by a fear,
Tho’ prudes may look scornful, and libertines sneer.
Tho’ tatlers and tale-bearers smiling may say,
"Your Geniuses always are out of the way,”
Sure none but herself would such levities mix,