Eliza Cook was the youngest of the eleven children of a brazier (a brass-worker) living in London Road, Southwark, where she was born. When she was about nine years old her father retired from business, and the family went to live at a small farm in St. Leonard's Forest, near Horsham. Her mother encouraged Eliza's fondness for imaginative literature, and despite attending the local Sunday school the child was almost entirely self-educated. At Sunday School she was encouraged by the music master's son to produce her first volume of poetry.[1] She began to write verses before she was fifteen, contributing to the Weekly Dispatch and New Monthly,[2] and published her first poetry collection two years later; indeed, some of her most popular poems, such as "I'm afloat" and the "Star of Glengarry," were composed in her girlhood. [3]
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