Charles Lloyd (poet)

Born in Birmingham, Charles Lloyd II was the eldest son of Charles Lloyd (1748–1828), the Quaker 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.^[1] 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.

In 1799 Lloyd married Sophia Pemberton; according to De Quincey they eloped by proxy, with the poet Robert Southey 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."^[2] During these years Lloyd worked on translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses.