Cowper, William (1731–1800)

Abstract

William Cowper was born at Great Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire, the son of the rector, John Cowper, who was chaplain to George II, and of Ann, née Donne, whose family claimed distant royal descent. He was educated at private schools and at Westminster. He went on to the Middle Temple, and was eventually called to the Bar in 1754. His mother’s death when he was six, and persecution by an older boy at Dr Pittman’s, one of his early schools, had given rise to serious psychological problems, which were severely aggravated in 1753 by the breakdown of his love affair with his cousin, Theadora Cowper. She was the ‘Delia’ of a remarkable series of personal lyrics (published posthumously) charting a descent from happy expectations to the nightmare world of separation and feverish longing. The melancholia subsided, and in the mid-1750s Cowper was moving confidently in fashionable circles in the metropolis, contributing papers to the literary periodical The Connoisseur. He transferred to the Inner Temple in 1757. Theadora’s father, Ashley Cowper, had opposed his daughter’s alliance with the young lawyer, but in 1763 he used his patronage to gain him an important clerkship of journals in the House of Lords. Controversy over his uncle’s right of nomination, however, and the prospect of a formal examination for the post plunged Cowper into the vortex of suicidal derangement.