Eliza Cook, New Media Innovator

This chapter provides an in-depth examination of the career Eliza Cook. After publishing her first book, Lays of a Wild Harp, Cook submitted verse to the Weekly Dispatch and soon thereafter became its house poet. By 1847, Cook was serving as editor of the paper’s ‘facts and scraps’ column, a position that enabled her to hone her editorial skills and publish the work of fellow women writers. Cook’s masculine appearance violated the poetess norm of the period, as did her romantic partnership with American actress Charlotte Cushman, but this seemed only to enhance her image as an eccentric yet accessible poet of the people. In 1849, she parlayed this fame into the founding of her own Eliza Cook’s Journal, which initially surpassed Dickens’s Household Words in popularity. Yet as the 1840s gave way to the more conservative 1850s, Cook was frequently the target of gender-trolling attacks in the popular press, which defined her as a sexual deviant on the one hand and a second-rate poet on the other. This notoriety may have been one factor that forced her to retreat from the public eye in 1852—a move that initiated her gradual disappearance from literary history.