JOHN GEORGE COOKE AND HIS LITERARY CONNECTIONS

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 2, Issue 2, 1 October 1969, Page 40

JOHN GEORGE COOKE AND HIS LITERARY CONNECTIONS

Joan Stevens

A number of the New Zealand Company settlers had literary connections. Browning's friendship with the cousins William Curling Young and Alfred Domett may be cited; Charles Armitage Brown, friend of Keats, ended his days in New Plymouth; Thomas, brother of Matthew Arnold, enlivened Nelson for a short time; and Mary Taylor, friend of Charlotte Bronte, climbed up Mount Victoria at Wellington in 1848 to watch for a ship which might take to Yorkshire her appreciation of Jane Eyre.

One such settler not previously noted is John George Cooke, who makes several quite dramatic appearances in the margins of literary history. In addition to associations with Trelawny, the friend of Shelley and Byron, with Armitage Brown, and with the Carlyles at Cheyne Row, Chelsea, Cooke had the distinction of being a relation of Jane Austen. It seems therefore worthwhile to assemble here some of the facts of his life.

The Cookes were from Devon, where they had been landowners and shipowners at Kenbury and Topsham. A seventeenth-century ancestor, Francis Cooke, was made a Canon of Winchester by the patronage of Bishop Trelawny. By 1750, John George's grandfather was established at Greenwich as Treasurer of the Hospital. One of his sons, John, who became a noted naval captain and died heroically on the Bellerophon at Trafalgar, merits an entry in the DNB. The eldest son, Christopher, born 1759, was a Naval Agent, and profiting greatly by the French Wars, bought himself a country estate, Ashgrove, at Sevenoaks, Kent, and set up there as a landed gentleman. His first wife, sister of Admiral Sir Manley Dixon, died in 1806. He then found a second wife in the household of his neighbour, Francis Motley Austen of Kippington. She was Elizabeth Austen, the second daughter, by this time a widow with two children. Her second marriage in 1810 to Christopher Cooke brought her six more. Here, then, is one link between Jane Austen the novelist and John George Cooke. Mrs Cooke's father, Francis Motley Austen, was cousin to Jane Austen's father, the Reverend George Austen of Steventon. It was Mrs Cooke's grandfather, Francis Austen, who had given his young nephew George a chance in life when the boy was left destitute in 1737 by his father's early death. Francis sent George Austen to Tonbridge school, 'whence he became a Scholar of St John's College, Oxford,' says Chapman. 1 'He was later a Fellow of his College, and taking orders obtained in 1761 the living of Steventon by presentation from his kinsman Thomas Knight of Godmersham.'

In 1764 the Reverend George Austen married Cassandra Leigh, and had eight children, of whom Jane was the seventh, bracketed by her sailor brothers Francis and Charles. The eldest son James carried on the family name, later Austen-Leigh. The third son Edward was adopted by his Knight relations, assumed their name, and in due course inherited their estates as Edward Knight of Godmersham and Chawton. (See Tables). Meanwhile 'Kind Uncle Francis' had also married; his son Francis Motley Austen, George's cousin, married in his turn. Of Motley's large family, six concern us here, Thomas, Jane, Frances, John, George and Elizabeth.

Thomas became Colonel Thomas Austen, later mp for Kent 1845-7; his second wife (m 1826) was sister to Cardinal Manning, and a relation by marriage of John Abel Smith. Jane married William John Campion of Danny whose mother was a Heathcote, and had sons William, Heathcote, and George. Frances married in 1808 Captain William Holcroft of the Royal Artillery, a match which Jane Austen, in a cousinly comment, described as 'misconduct'. 2 Her grandson George Holcroft (b 1832) came to New Zealand in 1871. 3 John went into the Church, was presented to the living of Chevening, and inherited the family estate of John Austen of Broadford. 4 A son, Charles Wilson Austen, rose to be Lieutenant-Colonel, and died commanding the 14th Regiment at the Siege of Rangiriri, Auckland, in 1863. George Lennard Austen, the fifth son, entered the family firm of solicitors, Austen and Holcroft of Sevenoaks, and married Harriett Hughes. Elizabeth Motley Austen's first marriage was to Colonel William Skyring (d 1806) by whom she had two daughters, Elizabeth and Emily Mary. Elizabeth Skyring married Major John Longley; after his death she remarried in 1843 Sir John Easthope of the Morning Chronicle. Emily Mary Skyring married Frederick Torrens, son of Sir Henry Torrens, and an officer in the Welsh Fusiliers.

In Elizabeth Austen’s second marriage to Christopher Cooke, John George, born 1819, was the second son and fifth child. In 1876, long after his return from New Zealand, John George Cooke compiled what he called ‘Reminiscences. Excerpta de ma vie. Souvenirs’., covering his family background and life up to 1850. This, a typescript, is held at Canterbury Museum, Christchurch, the original being owned by Rear Admiral A. D. Torlesse, Hants., England. There were, it seems, other journals also, likewise lost. From internal evidence, the Reminiscences were written for Cooke’s stepson Edward Ward, son of Crosbie Ward whose widow married Cooke in 1868.

The Reminiscences give a delightful picture of Cooke’s boyhood. In 1819, his father sold Ashgrove - the hounds and their huntsman went

into the service of the Prince Regent - and retired to East End House, Alresford. This little town lies at the lower point of a small triangle completed by Steventon and Chawton, both of Jane Austen relevance. (See ordinance map at p 523 of Chapman's edition of the Letters.) The constant visiting among the Austen kin which is so noticeable a feature of Jane's correspondence continued after her death, and Cooke recalls many day-long journeys into Kent or Sussex, travelling with the 'large family coach with box seat and rumble behind, which held six and eight people, a Barouche holding six, and the pony chaise', to stay at Kippington, or Danny, or Chevening. He preferred the Hampshire Austens to his own branch, however. 'The Austens of Sevenoaks and Kent generally are an eminently disagreeable and consequential race', he wrote, making an exception only of'our kindest and favourite relatives, uncle and Mrs George Austen of Sevenoaks'. This view is confirmed by the critical tone of Jane Austen's references to the Motley Austens and her 'connections in West Kent'. 5

Mrs George Lennard Austen, the favourite aunt, born Harriett Hughes, was doubly related to John George Cooke, for she was the niece of Louisa Hardy, who had married John George's uncle the heroic Captain John Cooke. She was, moreover, doubly linked to the Austens, not only through her husband, but through her brother, George William Hughes, later (1808) Hughes-d'Aeth, who in 1816 married Harriet Knatchbull. When in 1820 Harriett's brother Sir Edward Knatchbull, 9th Baronet, married Fanny, Jane's most loved niece, and daughter of Edward (Austen) Knight, a pretty tangle of cross connections was set up. (See Tables).

To clarify the Austen record, we must at this point distinguish* two families called Cooke, both cousins of Jane's parents. Our John George Cooke's family claimed cousinship with Jane's father; but Jane's mother had a cousin Cassandra Leigh, who married the Reverend Samuel Cooke. He and his children Theophilus, George and Mary often appear in Jane's letters. Jane does not mention the Cookes on her father's side, but notes other members of that family, Francis Motley Austen and his wife, and Harriett Lennard Austen their cousin, Colonel Thomas Austen and his first wife, the Reverend John Austen of Chevening, and young Frances Austen, whose marriage to Captain Holcroft in 1808 provoked the comment already quoted. Among other relations whom Cooke mentions in boyhood are his cousins William, Heathcote, and George Campion, William Holcroft, Edward Bridges Rice (grandson of Edward Knight), and Captain George Dixon, the last connected through his father's first marriage. New Zealand interest attaches to his friends the Greenwoods of nearby Bramdean, for one of the brothers, Robert, ultimately emigrated to Taranaki in 1850, 6 and a sister, Emily, had married the Cookes' great

friend Charles Biggs Calmady of Langdon Hall, near Plymouth, a promoter of the West of England colonising schemes. Other family friends were the Portals of Laverstoke, and Charles Holte Bracebridge of Atherstone Hall, Warwick, with his relatives the Wingfields and Digbys. And in lonely schooldays near Madehurst, the boy found kindness at Dale Park, for John Abel Smith was 'a friend of my uncle Colonel Austen'. (Smith's cousin Caroline had married the Reverend H. E. Manning, later Cardinal, the brother of Thomas Austen's second wife.)

At Christmas 1829, there was a big family party at East End House, when as Cooke recalled, 'the Greenwoods and my mother's cousin Edward Knight of Chawton came over to skate on the great pond or lake at Alresford . . . Our Christmas festivities were very joyous, we had Carol singers, small and great, and the village band and a set of mummers, who were wont to go round in masquerade playing a curious old mystery or play in which Father Christmas, the Lord of Misrule, St George, his six companions and the Dragon played parts. We had all the good old games and our private theatricals, where my sisters played parts in Miss Edgeworth's "Old Poz" and "Alfred the Saxon in the Dane's Camp", and my father, who had an excellent voice, used to sing some of the most excellent long-since-forgotten ballads, and also for our amusement blackened his face and enacted a nigger with great unction.'

The Knights of Godmersham and of Chawton, like the Greenwoods of Bramdean, come into the New Zealand story. The Reverend William Knight, son of Edward and brother therefore to Fanny Lady Knatchbull, held the living of Steventon, as his grandfather had done. He married Caroline Portal; in 1852 two of his sons, Richard and Arthur Charles, emigrated to Canterbury and established a run on the Selwyn River. Understandably, they called it Steventon. Arthur soon moved to Banks Peninsula, but Richard remained until 1866, when he sold out to F. N. Broome, husband of Lady Barker. It is the Steventon run which she describes in Station Life and Station Amusements, (1870, 1873).

Schooling over, in 1832 Cooke entered the Royal Naval College at Portsmouth. Here he visited his relations, 'Admiral Sir Francis Austen and Captain Charles Austen . . . own brothers to my beloved Jane Austen, whose works I know by heart.' They were, he noted, 'very unlike the other branch of Austens, our nearer relations in Kent, for they were liberal, amiable and well read'. Christopher Cooke died in 1833, leaving a fortune of .£IOO,OOO. In 1834 John George began his naval service as first midshipman on the Portland which was stationed in the Mediterranean. It was at this time that he met Arthur Wakefield, then First Lieutenant on the Thunderer;

at this time, too, he picked up that extraordinary story about Shelley’s friend ‘Pirate’ Trelawny which he recalled in a letter of 1878, and which gained currency through its publication in William Sharp’s The Life and Letters of Joseph Severn, 1892. Since this is one of Cooke’s major appearances in the margins of literary reference, I give here a substantial portion of the text. Edward John Trelawny was an intimate friend of both Shelley and Byron, and was with them on that Italian sailing expedition which ended so disastrously with Shelley’s death. It was Trelawny who cremated Shelley’s body in the funeral ceremony on the beach. This was 1822; in 1824, Trelawny was in Greece with Byron, and was at his death also. Cooke’s letter is addressed to Walter Severn, son of Joseph, who was collecting materials about his father’s life and friends. ‘June 29th, 1878

'As touching your request to write any news of Trelawny, "Pirate" Trelawny, or others connected with the Byronic, Shelley or Keats period, I fear I can give you nothing very interesting. J. E. Trelawny - if he were fourteen at the battle of Trafalgar, which he missed seeing owing to the supineness, as it has been stated, of his Admiral, Duckworth, in getting to sea and joining the Fleet under Lord Nelson and Collingwood - must now be eighty-seven years old, is, I believe, very hale and strong. Some four years have elapsed since I used to see him at the Turkish Baths at Brompton, and a finer specimen of a man of his age, it would be hard to see; he peeled as clean and muscular as a man of fifty. Your father will have two years ago read the remarkable testimony of an Italian boatman, at Spezzia, I think, who related to his, Trelawny's, daughter Letitia, the story current in that part of Italy that Shelley's yacht had been run down by a fishing-boat, no doubt with villainous intent, as they had heard and believed Lord Byron with money was on board the yacht with Mr Shelley and Captain Williams. It sounded vero, if not ben trovato.

\ . . Did I ever tell you a wonderful story - no doubt there were hundreds extant some forty years ago - which I heard when a midshipman in the Mediterranean in 1835, not so very long after the Greek War of Independence, when Trelawny distinguished himself? It is a curious and rather a ghastly story. Your father will well remember that when Trelawny was in Greece he lived maritalement with a daughter of the great Greek Chief Odysseus in the Morea, and she had a child by him. When Trelawny left Greece for Italia he took this child with him. Months afterwards the Odysseus family was made aware of the certainty of not seeing their respected son-in-law again, and wrote to him begging that the child might be sent back. A long time passed, and at last comes a letter to say if the Chief Odysseus or his representative would come across on a certain day to the Custom House at

Zante, the child would be forthcoming. A scampavia was dispatched and away went some of the Odysseus family to Zante. The Custom House authorities could give no account of any child, but they stated that a box had arrived via Corfu, which it was much wished should be removed by the Greeks, as it smelt offensively. Whereupon the box was delivered and opened, and a child's body, dead some weeks, appeared; whether any invoice or remarks by Trelawny accompanied it I never heard. The child had died, and he took this grim and savage way of ridding himself of all connection with the Odysseus circle. I wonder I never thought, when in New Zealand some thirty-five years ago, and in constant communication with Mr C. A. Brown, of asking him if he had heard this story. My sister, who has been dead some fourteen years, was wife to the British Resident, Major John Longley, a brother of the late Archbishop of Canterbury, and she had heard it from Zanteotes, although it must have happened before John Longley became resident.

'I saw a great deal of Mr Brown when in New Zealand; poor gentleman, he made a great mistake in coming out to a then wild and savage country, and where he was miserable. His son had gone before him, and this was the inducement. He amused me by long stories of Keats, Shelley, Byron, and Trelawny, and your good father, and the Hunts, etc'

This 'ghastly story' has found its way into the DNB entry on Trelawny, as well as into the biographical pages of Harold Nicolson and others. H.J. Massingham, however, in his Memoir, offers the version given to him by the grandson of Zella Trelawny, the supposed baby of the tale. According to this Zella went with her father to Italy when he left his Greek wife Tersitsa Kemenou, but lived to grow up and marry. It was the death by misadventure of a second infant which provided the nucleus for the scandal which was still current at Zante almost ten years later, when Cooke and the Longleys heard it. This 1878 letter introduces also another of Cooke's literary associates, Charles Armitage Brown, in whose house at Hampstead the poet Keats had lived from 18 17 to 1820, the painter Joseph Severn being also of the company. After the death of Keats in 1821, Brown continued his association with the Romantic group. Trelawny stayed with him in Florence in 1829, while Brown helped him with his Adventures of a Younger Son, and advised him on how to deal with that difficult widow, Mary Shelley. In 1837, Brown returned to England, living at Plymouth, where he lectured on Keats and prepared material for a biography. When he and his son Charles decided instead to emigrate, Brown handed all his papers on to Monckton Milnes, who used them in the first biography of Keats, in 1848. Charles the son sailed for New Plymouth in the Amelia Thompson

in March 1841, having John George Cooke as his cabin mate, and old Armitage Brown followed in the Oriental in June 1841. 'I have bought land in New Zealand,' he wrote, 'with machinery to take thither, from pins and needles up to a Saw-Mill and a steam-engine.' 7 Some Keats relics came with Brown, including a copy of the sketch of Keats on his death-bed which Joseph Severn had made, and a 'life-size medallion profile-portrait of Keats', both of which his son Charles afterwards gave to Alfred Domett. 8 As Cooke said, Armitage Brown was miserable in New Plymouth, and angry at Company mismanagement. He died in June 1842.

Cooke's career in the Navy was cut short in 1836 by eye trouble, and he changed to the Army. After a period in Germany, including a Munich holiday with the Wingfields, the Bracebridges, and the Lennard Austens of Kippington, he was commissioned Ensign in the 53rd (Shropshire) Regiment, and took up duty at the depot at Naas, near Dublin, early in 1839. A few months later they moved to Plymouth, and it was here, in the nest of Cornish families involved with the New Zealand Company plans, that Cooke became 'colonially bitten'. At this point his Reminiscences contain many names familiar in New Zealand history. Ned Duppa was there, his brother George sailing in the Oriental with Francis Molesworth, Henry Petre, and Walter Mantell at the end of the year. Calmady and Edward St Aubyn urged Cooke to go with them.

Cooke called on his Plymouth relations, the family of Admiral Foote (cousins of the Knights), the Manley Dixons, etc. The Wingfields were visiting the St Aubyns, and Cooke fell in love all over again with Charlotte Wingfield. He stayed with the Lemons of Cardew (cousins of the Bullers) and at Pencarrow, Bodmin, meeting there Sir William Molesworth, various Trelawnys, the Grotes, and the Bullers, Charles and Arthur. He went riding 'over Bodmin Moor, or far or near' with Caroline Trelawny and Mary Molesworth, while his Charlotte flirted - in vain - with Sir William. She was, Cooke wrote angrily some forty years later, 'such a born coquette that she would have fascinated a crossing sweeper had no other game presented itself. Her inconstancy was the last straw, and Cooke determined to take his broken heart to New Zealand. After trying unsuccessfully to persuade Robert Greenwood to accompany him, he sailed with his old soldier servant Johnston in March 1841 on the Amelia Thompson. The record of Cooke's New Zealand sojourn is detailed and lively. He took up land at Te Hua and at Henui village, on the north-eastern edge of New Plymouth; for a time he managed work and survey gangs for the Company. He built at Henui a strong little stone house, still, standing, which he sold in 1846 to Bishop Selwyn for Mr Bolland's parsonage. In spite of trouble with the Maoris, he farmed his land at

Te Hua, where in 1847 his friend Walter Mantell joined him. Before this, he had become a leader in the colony, being made a magistrate in 1842, and often acting as spokesman for the settlers. In January 1844 he went overland to Auckland to place their grievances before Governor Fitzßoy, passing on the way through the Wesleyan mission at Kawhia, where he found the Reverend Whiteley to be a ‘kind and excellent man’.

Cooke's notes on his acquaintances give enlightening glimpses of our pioneers; these will do as a sample. —of Charles Samuel Niblett, at Wanganui, 'a very gentleman-like, active fellow ... he was going to the dogs with drink' (but he was safely back in Gloucestershire by 1845). of William Ernest Wilkinson, at Nelson, 'a wild young fellow . . . a young surveyor whom I knew very well in after life and his family who were half Quakers and half Jews. The mother was a Ricardo and all on the Stock Exchange in London'. (Son of William Arthur Wilkinson and Esther Ricardo, sister of David.)

of Edward Jerningham Wakefield, at Wanganui, 'pranks . . . riots and debaucheries . . . plurality of wives and concubines'. This last accusation must be read in the light of Cooke's own conduct, for he was in no position to throw stones. In his Reminiscences, he records that he lingered at Tarawera on his return journey from Auckland in 1844 and took 'a dusky bride' whom he never saw again. The Reverend Whiteley in a letter to Clarke the Protector of Aborigines, complained of Cooke as follows: 'His practice has been to cohabit with one [Maori woman] until she was in the family way, and then to turn her adrift - he has played this part with 3 or 4, and his last lady was from another tribe, which with his former conduct so exasperated the natives that they resolved to avenge themselves and commenced operations on his land.' To this, W. H. Skinner, who copied out the passage for Horace Fildes in 1934, 9 added a footnote: 'One of Cooke's "ladys" was niece of Wi Tako, her child was known as Mary Cooke. She married one of our settlers and has left a numerous, industrious and greatly respected family, but no credit to Cooke, who left the child to the care of the tribe.'

The Taranaki Museum at New Plymouth has a portrait of this Maori ‘wife’, which carries an inscription identifying her as Ngapei Ngatata, ‘youngest sister of the Hon. Wi Tako Ngatata’, ie Wiremu Tako Ngatata, 10 paramount chief of Ngati-Awa, and Maori leader at Wellington until his death in 1887. The portrait was painted in Wellington in 1888. One cannot, of course, accept without question evidence of this type. Whiteley’s letter is dated July 1844, but the Maori depredations on the

Te Hua land had begun before Cooke went to Auckland, at least as early as 1843. 11 Cooke’s own story of the ‘dusky bride’ however confirms part of the accusation. In this context, one of his comments concerning Maori women is relevant. ‘When these women took up and became the wife “par amour ” to a European without the ceremony, they were true and faithful and some of them good housewives.’ Ngapei Ngatata seems to have regarded herself as a true wife, but Cooke abandoned her. Perhaps this is among the ‘wrongdoings’ of which he speaks in the Reminiscences of 1876. He returned to England in 1850, bearing oddly enough, a letter for personal delivery to Thackeray from Edward Jerningham Wakefield, who had been friendly with the novelist in London. On arrival he paid a round of visits to the relatives of New Zealand friends, and made a vain attempt to explain the realities of colonial affairs to Gibbon Wakefield and the Canterbury Association.

His sister Elizabeth was by this time the wife of Sir John Easthope, whom Cooke disliked as ‘illiterate and perfectly unscrupulous ... as thorough a rascal as ever lived’, an opinion in which he was not alone. The Easthopes had of course a wide range of literary and political friends. So did Cooke’s sister Emily and her husband Frederick Torrens. Cooke did not approve of them, either, for, ‘from intimate acquaintance with the Dickens’, he wrote, they ‘came to know many Bohemians, foreign and home productions, who were not so desirable’. Cooke also records that he visited his ‘relations at Danny, the Campions, and all the Austens in Kent’. The Campions, as has been noted, were related to the Heathcotes, in a branch collateral to that of Sir William, sth Baronet, who was a founding member of the Canterbury Association. The Heathcotes have another Austen association also, for Sir William’s mother, Elizabeth Bigg (-Wither) of Many down, was the sister of that Harris Bigg-Wither who, one evening in November 1802, had proposed to Jane Austen, and been accepted. But she changed her mind the next morning. l2 (See Tables.)

The Reminiscences cease abruptly at the end of 1850, and Cooke’s trail is lost until 1856, when he appears once more on the literary fringe, this time as a constant visitor in the Carlyle household at Cheyne Row, Chelsea. Jane Carlyle’s letters soon begin to mention him regularly, and he appears also in the letters of her protegee, the minor novelist Geraldine Jewsbury. From 1856 to 1859 Geraldine was in hot pursuit of Cooke’s friend Walter Mantell, who was then in London. Mantell escaped from her, however, much to the relief of the Carlyles, who regarded him as ‘far too clever and substantial a man to be thrown away on a flimsy tatter of a creature like Geraldine Jewsbury’. 13 The Jewsbury-Mantell correspondence went on however until her death in 1880, enriching the Mantell Collection in the Alexander

Turnbull Library with some five hundred letters. The friends used Maori nicknames; Mantell was Matara, Geraldine was Manu, and Cooke was Ku. A number of Mantell’s replies to his fair pursuer in 1856-9 are headed from ‘Ku’s office’.

As for Jane Welsh Carlyle, the witty, possessive, neurotic little woman whom Thomas had married, she and John George Cooke struck up a close friendship. Its course may be traced in her letters, or more conveniently in Hanson’s Necessary Evil. Jane was soon ‘Yours Affectionately’ to Cooke; she comforted him for a whole week in December 1858 when his mother died. He is described as ‘very attentive and sympathetic’ to her, 14 squiring her to the station, offering flowers, advice about servants, and Scottish ‘First-Foot Gifts’ at New Year. 15 Probably his finest hour was in 1864, when Jane returned to Cheyne Row after an almost mortal illness. Here is her account of their reunion.

‘As soon as I was in the drawing-room George Cooke came . . . Now this George Cooke is a man between thirty and forty; tall, strong, silent, sincere: has been a sailor, a soldier, a New Zealand settler, a “man about town”, and a stockbroker! The last man on earth one would have expected to make one “a scene”. But, lo! what happened? I stood up to welcome him, and he took me in his arms, and kissed me two or three times, and then he sank into a chair and - burst into tears! and sobbed and cried like any schoolboy. Mercifully I was not affected by his agitation.’ 16 She was then 63, and he was 45; even allowing for her over-emphasis, that makes a fine Victorian tableau.

Jane Carlyle died in 1866; in 1867, Cooke’s friend Crosbie Ward, who had visited London in 1863, was there once more, acting as Agent for Canterbury. He died, however, in December, and the next year his widow married Cooke. She already had two children; there was a third in the second marriage. 17 Surviving letters in the Turnbull Library give occasional glimpses of Cooke’s life in London at this time. There is mention of‘a jolly evening at Henry Petre’s’, with such names noted as Charles Clifford, Nathaniel Levin, Charles Hursthouse, and George Duppa. 18 In 1863, there is a nice conflation of colonial and literary associations, when Cooke reports to Mantell that ‘Trelawny was greatly pleased with the “Pakeha and Maori” book, Old New Zealand. Who wrote it?’ Those who know Trelawny’s Adventures of a Younger Son will understand why Maning’s story so pleased the old ‘Pirate’. And so time passed on. Geraldine Jewsbury kept Walter Mantell in New Zealand informed of the progress of the Cooke marriage, its new arrivals, the loss of a baby son, Mrs Cooke’s health, etc. He did not find it easy at first to be ‘tied to his hearth and home’, having been ‘so much of a Mormon in some respects’. 19

In 1876, disaster struck. Cooke became involved in the collapse of shares on the Stock Exchange, and made ‘a terrible shipwreck of character life fortune family’. He lost his own money, and that of relatives and friends, but worse still, it seems, ‘sold securities and deeds that belonged to others’. Abandoning his wife and family to debts totalling some -£45,000 he fled to Sweden, where he seems to have stayed for several years. 20 It was during this period of exile that he wrote his Reminiscences, which refer to his ‘unlucky self’, to ‘drifting into rocks and quicksands’, and to being ‘a victim to a gang of robbers’. By 1878, when he answered the inquiry from Walter Severn in the letter already quoted, he seems to have been back in England, though retaining business interests in Sweden. From the tone of Sharp’s reference in 1892, it may be inferred that Cooke was then still alive. If he kept any further records or journals, their whereabouts is not at present known.

My thanks are due to many people who assisted me in this inquiry, particularly Mr J. C. Wilson of the Canterbury Museum, Mr Rigby Allan of the Taranaki Museum, and Miss Rona Clarke of the Victoria University Library. Mr Bagnall and the Staff of the Alexander Turnbull Library have been unfailingly patient and helpful. Quotations from manuscript material of Cooke, Mantell, Jewsbury, Fildes, by courtesy of the Libraries concerned.

REFERENCES Including general sources not indicated in the text SOURCES AND REFERENCES Cooke, John George. Reminiscences written 1876. Typescript, Canterbury Museum. Sharp, William. The Life and Letters Joseph Severn. London, 1892. 1 Chapman, R. W.Jane Austen. Facts and problems. Oxford, 1948, p. 3. 2 Austen, Jane. Jane Austen's Letters collected and edited by R. W. Chapman. 2nd ed. London, 1959, p. 206 and note. 3 Cooke to McLean 22 April 1871, McLean papers A.T.L. 4 Austen, Jane. Letters, p. 182 and note. s lbid. pp. 35, 182, 318, 322 and note p. 474. 6 Dictionary of New Zealand Biography; 1940. (DNZB): Greenwood, Robert. 7 Rollins, H. E., ed. The Keats circle. Letters and papers 1816-78. 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass., 1948. Vol. 11, p. 50. B Domett, Alfred. The Diary of Alfred Domett, 1872-85, edited by E. A. Horsman. London, 1958, pp. 193, 196. 9 Fildes Collection, Victoria University of Wellington, Box 21. 10 DNZB: Ngatata, Wiremu Tako. 11 Wells, Benjamin. History of Taranaki. New Plymouth, 1878, p. 100. 12 Chapman, Jane Austen. Facts ... p. 61.

13 Carlyle, Jane Welsh. New Letters and Memorials, ed. by Alexander Carlyle. 2 vols. London, 1903. Vol. 11, pp. 216, 218. 14 Carlyle, Jane Welsh. Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, ed. by James A. Froude. 3 vols. London, 1883. Vol. 11, p. 367. 15 Ibid, Vol. 111, pp. 92-3. 16 Ibid, Vol. 111, p. 222. 17 DNZB: Ward, Crosbie; Cooke to McLean, 22 April 1871. 18 Cooke to W. B. D. Mantell, 16 Sep., 1863; Mantell papers, A.T.L., Cooke to McLean 22 April 1871, 25 March 1874. 19 Jewsbury to Mantell, 21 February 1870. 20 Jewsbury to Mantell: 31 May 1876; 18 September 1876; 25 October 1876; 9 October 1878; 27 May 1879.

WORKS CONSULTED Acland, L. G. D. The Early Canterbury Runs. Wellington, 1930. Austen-Leigh, R. A. Pedigree Austen ofHorsmonden, Broadford... (etc). 1940 (Society of Genealogists). Austen-Leigh, William and Richard. Jane Austen. Her Life and Letters. 2d ed. London, 1913Burke, John. A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Peerage and Baronetage of the British Empire. 6th ed. London, 1839. (and other relevant dates) Burke, John Bernard. A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland. 7th ed. London, 1886. (and other relevant dates) Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) Hanson, Lawrence and Elizabeth. Necessary Evil: the life Jane Welsh Carlyle. London, 1952. Howe, Susanne. Geraldine Jewsbury. Her Life and Errors. London, 1935. Jewsbury, Geraldine. Letters to W. B. D. Mantell, etc. MSS, Mantell Collection, A.T.L. Massingham, H.J. The Friend of Shelley. A memoir of Edward Trelawny. London 1930. O'Byrne, William R. A Naval Biographical Dictionary. London, 1849. O'Donnell, Captain H. (ed). Historical Records of the 14th Regiment. Devonport, 1893.