Charles Cowden Clarke

Charles Cowden Clarke (15 December 1787 – 13 March 1877), English author and Shakespearian scholar, was born in Enfield, Middlesex.

Clarke's father, John Clarke, was a schoolmaster in Clarke's Academy in Enfield Town, among whose pupils was John Keats. Charles Clarke taught Keats his letters and encouraged his love of poetry. He knew Charles and Mary Lamb, and afterwards became acquainted with Shelley, Leigh Hunt, Coleridge, Hazlitt, William Macready, Charles Dickens,Douglas Jerrold, and William Godwin. Clarke became a music publisher in partnership with Alfred Novello, and married in 1828 his partner's sister, Mary Victoria (1809–1898), the eldest daughter of Vincent Novello, who was to become known for her Concordance to Shakespeare, a work that she began in the year following their marriage.

Cowden Clarke published many useful books, and edited the text for John Nichol's edition of the British poets. His most important work consisted of lectures delivered between 1834 and 1856 on Shakespeare and other literary subjects. Some of the more notable series were published, among them being Shakespeare's Characters, chiefly those subordinate (1863), and Molière's Characters (1865). In 1859 he published a volume of original poems, Carmina Minima.

1n 1832, the cricketer John Nyren began a collaboration with Clarke, who recorded Nyren's reminiscences of the Hambledon era and published them serially in a periodical called The Town. The following year, the series of articles appeared as The Cricketers of My Time as part of an instructional book entitled The Young Cricketer's Tutor. It became a major source for the history and personalities of Georgian cricket and also came to be regarded as the first classic in cricket's now rich literary history.

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