The friendship between William Cowper and Lady Ann Austen lasted for less than three years — from July 1781 until May 1784 — and even that short period included a rupture of two months in early 1782. Yet this relationship in different ways gave Cowper the starting-point for his greatest popular success The Diverting History

One of the minor pleasures in life is staying with someone, or in their house, and discovering there a book one has not read – or even perhaps thought of reading – but which gives unexpected delight. In the mid-1970s when I was vicar of All Saints Fulham a member of the congregation, Kathleen Epstein,

In the persona of Virgil Wigwam, Texan professor of creative writing and scourge of English poetic amateurism, the poet Edwin Morgan once noted the way that, in this country, we like to count up what Professor Wigwam calls ‘your rather large number of mad poets’. Prominent in all such audits, of course, are William Cowper

The mid—nineteenth century saw the development, in Britain, of an affordable, ‘middle-class’, substitute for the white marble figures, groups, and portrait busts that adorned the homes of the rich. Most readers will be familiar with examples of this Parian porcelain, or ‘Parian ware’, so called after the marble from the Greek island of Paros. The

Judge Thomas Martin of Pennsylvania has kindly donated the following newly discovered, signed letter by John Newton to the Museum. We do not know to whom it was addressed, as the direction on the verso is covered by the page of a scrapbook into which the previous owner pasted it. We do know however that

Cowper is one of the great hymn writers. There can be few people, however, who know that there is a hymn tune named after him. Composed by J.G. Whittaker, it appears in Companion Tunes to Gadsby’s Hymnbook (1927), a substantial compilation of old favourites and newer pieces intended, as the title suggests, to meet the

Of all the many emails and enquiries that come into the museum, by far the most numerous are about ‘Amazing Grace’. “How did it come to be written?”, “Did Newton write the music?”, etc., etc. Consequently I wrote this piece as a standard answer to all such questions. Most of these enquiries come from the

Your sea of troubles you have past, And found the peaceful shore These were the words I included in the March (Cambridgeshire) Grammar School magazine at the end of my last year there. Roman House were the champions. I was their house captain. Wonderful days! Yet it was the rest of the verse which always

Among the several types of collectable ephemera, cigarette cards are one of the most fascinating. Issued in their millions from the 1880s through to the outbreak of the Second World War (and later in occasional series and with cigar brands), they comprise a rich reflection of historical events and circumstance, were long a core source

Olney Hymns, first published in 1779, is a collection of 348 hymns, 67 of them written by William Cowper and 281 by John Newton. I have compiled a computerised index of the hymns, with the main index being in alphabetical order of first lines. Other headings in the index include the Book number (of 3,

William Cowper: Religion, Satire, Society stands admirably as one of few book-length critical explorations of Cowper’s poetry. Brunström opens his account with some bold claims too. This is a study, he states, which offers ‘a corrective recentering of modern perceptions of eighteenth-century poetry and its ideological concerns’ in order to reposition Cowper’s poems on a