NEWS RELEASES
Space Between the Covers at Horsham Museum
19th June 2007
Horsham Museum has just managed to acquire from top London book dealers a complete run of Eliza Cook’s Journal published in 1849 -1854.
If you, like the book dealer, wonder why a Museum in the heart of rural Sussex would want a Journal written, edited and published by a woman as she said for “amusement and utility”, you would not be alone. After all, the book has no costume illustrations that can help date the Museums superb collection of Victorian clothing. It has no information on the town of Horsham, a town that only a year before the first publication had a railway line built to connect it to the outside world. But like the more famous celebrity Shelley, Eliza Cook is one of Horsham’s forgotten cultural figures, an authoress whose Journal has over 400,000 hits on google and who at the age of ten moved from Southwark to St Leonard’s Forest.
Eliza Cook was the daughter of a London tradesman who moved to a farm in St Leonard’s Forest in 1821. Probably self taught, but encouraged by her mother, she started to write poetry finding it easier to write than prose. By 1835 she had her first book of poetry published and was soon seeing her work in a number of journals and magazines. Some ten years later she moved back to London.
Although Eliza Cook lived in St Leonard’s Forest and can be seen as a Horsham authoress she has largely been forgotten in her nearby town. You will find no street, no pub and no memorial to her, even though in today’s academic world there are thousands of pages written about this remarkable woman, a woman who is of interest to those studying women writers, gender studies, education, working class movements, Victorian radicalism, publishing and print journalism. Now we can add a new field of interest - Horsham’s Local History.
The weekly issues of Eliza Cook’s Journal which have been bound up in 7 stout volumes may be consulted on request at Horsham Museum. They join an ever growing collection of material relating to people who were born, lived or who died in the Horsham District that have played a part in national history. This acquisition will ensure that Eliza Cook is no longer seen as a forgotten Horsham resident.
For further information please contact Jeremy Knight, Curator.
Horsham Museum
9 Causeway, Horsham, West Sussex RH12 1HE
Tel: (01403) 254959
Fax: (01403) 282594
Email: museum@horsham.gov.uk
Web: http://www.horshammuseum.org