Charles Lloyd the poet with his wife Sophia

Charles Lloyd II (12 February 1775 – 16 January 1839) was an English poet who was a friend of

Charles Lamb Charles Lamb (10 February 1775 – 27 December 1834) was an English essayist, poet, and antiquarian, best known for his '' Essays of Elia'' and for the children's book ''Tales from Shakespeare'', co-authored with his sister, Mary Lamb (1764– ...

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Samuel Taylor Coleridge (; 21 October 177225 July 1834) was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lak ...

Robert Southey Robert Southey ( or ; 12 August 1774 – 21 March 1843) was an English poet of the Romantic school, and Poet Laureate from 1813 until his death. Like the other Lake Poets, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Southey began as a ...

William Wordsworth William Wordsworth (7 April 177023 April 1850) was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication ''Lyrical Ballads'' (1798). Wordsworth's '' ...

Dorothy Wordsworth Dorothy Mae Ann Wordsworth (25 December 1771 – 25 January 1855) was an English author, poet, and diarist. She was the sister of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, and the two were close all their adult lives. Dorothy Wordsworth had no am ...

and

Thomas de Quincey Thomas Penson De Quincey (; 15 August 17858 December 1859) was an English writer, essayist, and literary critic, best known for his '' Confessions of an English Opium-Eater'' (1821). Many scholars suggest that in publishing this work De Quinc ...

. His best-known poem is "Desultory Thoughts in London".

Early life

Born in

Birmingham Birmingham ( ) is a city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands in England. It is the second-largest city in the United Kingdom with a population of 1.145 million in the city proper, 2.92 million in the We ...

, Charles Lloyd II was the eldest son of Charles Lloyd (1748–1828), the

Quaker Quakers are people who belong to a historically Protestant Christian set of Christian denomination, denominations known formally as the Religious Society of Friends. Members of these movements ("theFriends") are generally united by a belie ...

banker and philanthropist. His sister Priscilla married Christopher Wordsworth (brother of the poet) and another sister Anna Braithwaite was a Quaker preacher who toured Britain, Ireland and the United States several times. He was educated by a private tutor with the idea that he would work at his father's bank, but finance bored him. Instead he turned to poetry, his first publication appearing in 1795. Soon after he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge and moved in with him, Coleridge agreeing to instruct him in return for £80 a year. Coleridge's "To a Friend" and "To a Young Man of Fortune" are probably addressed to Lloyd. Coleridge introduced him to Charles Lamb, and the two supplied introductory and concluding verses to his next volume of poetry. A new edition of Coleridge's poetry included poems by Lamb and Lloyd, and referred to the friendship of the authors. Soon after, however, in November 1797, an author signing himself Nehemiah Higginbotham parodied the three of them (and perhaps Robert Southey) in the ''Monthly Magazine''; this author turned out to be Coleridge himself. A break followed, but Lloyd still referred to Coleridge as a friend in the preface to his novel ''Edmund Oliver'', published in 1798. The work was, however, taken as parodic of Coleridge and their friendship ended, temporarily also causing a rift between Lamb and Coleridge. That same year he published a volume of blank verse in collaboration with Charles Lamb.

Marriage and children

In 1799 Lloyd married Sophia Pemberton; according to De Quincey they eloped by proxy, with the poet

standing in for Lloyd. They had nine children and De Quincey, who met them in 1807, described Sophia "as a wife and mother unsurpassed by anybody I have known in either of those characters." During these years Lloyd worked on translating

Ovid Pūblius Ovidius Nāsō (; 20 March 43 BC – 17/18 AD), known in English as Ovid ( ), was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a contemporary of the older Virgil and Horace, with whom he is often ranked as one of the ...

’s ''Metamorphoses''.

Illness and death

Around 1811 Charles Lloyd started suffering from auditory hallucinations and "fits of aberration" that resulted in his being confined to an asylum; first at The Retreat, followed by a private asylum at Gretford in Lincolnshire. From 1813 to 1815 he translated nineteen tragedies of Vittorio Alfieri into

blank verse Blank verse is poetry written with regular metrical but unrhymed lines, almost always in iambic pentameter. It has been described as "probably the most common and influential form that English poetry has taken since the 16th century", and ...

(revised and augmented to twenty-two in 1876 by

Edgar Alfred Bowring Edgar Alfred Bowring (; 26 May 1826 – August 1911) was a British translator, author and civil servant, serving as librarian and registrar to the Board of Trade (1848–1863), secretary to the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, and Li ...

). In 1818 he escaped and turned up at De Quincey's cottage, claiming to be the devil, but managed to reason himself out of that conviction. Soon after he recovered, temporarily, and rejoined his wife in London. A flurry of literary activity followed with the publication of ''Nugae Canorae'' (1819), ''Desultory Thoughts in London, Titus and Gisippus, and Other Poems'' (1821), and ''Poetical Essays on the Character of Pope'' (1822). A small volume of poems in 1823 ended this burst of creativity, and from that time almost nothing is known of him. He died near

Versailles The Palace of Versailles ( ; french: Château de Versailles ) is a former royal residence built by King Louis XIV located in Versailles, about west of Paris, France. The palace is owned by the French Republic and since 1995 has been managed, ...

, France, in 1839 aged 63."Charles Lloyd" in ''Dictionary of National Biography'' (New York, 1909), volume xi, pp. 1192-4.

References

External links

Charles Lloyd (1775-1839)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lloyd, Charles Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge Writers from Birmingham, West Midlands 1775 births 1839 deaths English people of Welsh descent English male poets English translators Lloyd family of Birmingham