The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1872-09-28 00:00:00

COWPER'S HOUSE.

On the above subject, "H. M. M." writes to The
Tima :
In a pleasant part of Norfolk, half way between Norwich
and the little seaport of Wells, lies the picturesque town of
Fast Dereham. The church, a noble building, has long been
specially famous as the burying-place of the poet Cowper.
lie rests in the north transept, and the spot is marked by
ff ayley's simple design of a palm leaf overlying a Bible and
The Task, the model of which is said to have been approved
by William Blake and Flaxman. The transept has had its
interest heightened ever since the touching lyric, called
Coloper's Grave, was published by a poetess who now herself
has joined the departed.
At Dereham, Cowper spent the last three years and a half
of his life (1;93.1v.5.;. The house which he occupied during
that time—his latest home, his last retreat, where (among
other things) he wrote Dr. Arnet,'s favourite poem, The
Ceetaway—stands, much as he left it, en the upper side of
the market-place. A perfect model of the 18111 century
house, it is built of red brick, with very wide unmodernlred
sash windows in the front, and a pleasant garden stretches
behind it. Murray's Hand-book of the Eastern Counties is
wrong in describing the house as a bauk. It is at this
moment occupied by a bank manager, but it is simply a
private dwellinghouse, most courteously shown to visitors
who bear Cowper in remembrance.
.•••• • • • •

Now, it is for this home that I beg to be allowed to plead.
It is no shaky ruin, no uudghly redo: in painful and shabby
di apidation. It is a good solid home, a model of Its period,
as I said, and filled with Cowper's memory.
Yet it is threatened with dire ant ignominious destruc-
tion, awl the thi,at is on the point of being carnet out. If
Cowper has not enough friends in England to save it before
next April, the Noncontorm4t b.,dy of Independents will
pull it down, and build a chapel on the site. the house has
already been bought (excepting a small port' *di sold
separately to a purchaser, who, one might hope, would listen
In a reasonable appeal), and plans have been prepared for a
"neat Go hie structure," which is to be called the "Cowper
Congregottual Church"
- •• • •

The question of saving this house is no question between
Church and Dissent. I appeal to intelligent Nonconformists
through the country, much more than to Citurehmen, to ex-
postulate with the Dereham Independents, to point out to
them their mistake in vulgarising the name of Coe per Into
an advertising machine, and then to aid in the creation of a
fund which may make it worth the Independents' while to
turn their thoughts elsewhere. It should Ise added, that the
existing congregational building is ample, us far as room
gore and and that it stands ins part of the town where there is
plenty of sound work to do.
Of course, as Caseper'a name seemed to the committee to
be a lev. r worth working, thy had a perfect right to their
bargain, commercially. But is it too mach to expect that,
flees ion, the abler leaders of the Independent body will
see the MO policy (to go no higher) of handling Cowper's
memory in the commerckl manner, and of carrying out a
measure which will deprive the place of half its special in-
terest, besides causing regret to everyone in the neighbour-
hood excepting the committee. The Yankee proposition, to
export Shakspeare s hone bodily from Stratford, was not
nearly so barbaric as the" Cowper Congregational Church"
scheme a
And is it too much to ask that if once the committee can
be Induced to reconsider their policy, the lovers of Cowper
throughout England will raise the comparatively small
sum that would provide an equally good building on an
altered site, with some sort of added compensation?
There is no time to be lost. if the thing is to be done, It
must be set about at once. In togging the aid of those who
have name and means and influence, I have no doubt that
I may refs r them to tb" Rte. William Cowper Johnson,
Hector of Yaxham. nes:- Dereham, son to a near kinsman
of the poet. The Vint., oi I.ereham would also, doubtlessly,
give information, though As, more than any one, would
naturally deprecate the notion of there being any question
between Church and Dissent. There is, in fact, nothing of
the sort. The question, I repeat, to one for Nonconformists
much more than for Churchmen. Moat of stilt Ins question
that concerns the memory of Cowper, and theee to whom his
memory In dear.
You, Si,, have succeeded In barring COADY an act of Van-
dalism before now. Will you come forward once more and
lend your aid In laving Cowper's house from the fate I have
described?

P.s—l feel sure thst the gentlemen meuttooed before. or
either of them would be able to make some feasible sug-
gestion as to the beat mode of receiving subscriptiona

Tn connection with the foregoing, the Daily New ham the
following :-
- - - •

The p-rettY little country town of East Dereham, in
Norfolk, is just now disturbed at the prospect of losing
one of itsi lions. The poet Cowper apent the laet three
yi are of his life in the town; wrote his last poem
there; and was buried in it,. parish church, where a
monument has been erected, which people still make
pilgrimages to see. In the minket place stands one of
those old-fashioned, substantial, red-brick house!, such
as n ay still be seen at Hampstead, awl Highgate, and
Stoke Newington-green, which were the beat kind of
midillesclass dwellings of the last century In this
house lived that Mr. Johnson, under whore care
Cowin r had born placed when hia mental malady hail
render. d it imp. ssi ilr that he should rrniain in the
familiar home at Weiten. It!. not quite eras a liether
Cowper died there, for he had several removals write
living with Mr. Johnson. When he wrote on the
shutter of his bedroom at Weston the lines :

Farewell, dear seen, for ever closed to me :
! for what sorrows must I now exeluun.,e ye !
he was just removing to North Tuddenham. A few
months later he was taken to Dunham Lodge, near
Swaffilaul. It was in 179 i; that Mr. Johnson took him
to East Derehann, where Mrs. "Unwise died in the
middle of December. In this house Cowper reruaine I
for three years, writing only that tuelamdeily poem in
which he compared himself to a man cast away at sea,
who "bitter felt it still to die deserted and his friends
no nigh ; " and accurately described his own condition
in the lines: _ .

We perished, each alone,
But I beneath a rougher sea
And u helmet' in deeper gulfs than he.

But it seems certain that Cowper did not die in the
house in which he passed those three years. Mr. John.
son removed at the end of 1799 to a more commodious
house in the same town of East Dereham ; and it was
in this second house that Cowper fell into the atrophy
of despair, and died on the 25th of April, 1800.
It is somewhat strange that a spot made memorable
by the residence of one of our great English poets
should be threatened with destruction. The people of
little towns are generally over anxious about the
small scraps of historic recollections which may gather
about them. In large cities the tide of life flows on,
and soon obliterates any footsteps but those of giants ;
but in more sheltered nooks the prints upon the
sand remains, and the people carefully preserve them
to show to any passing traveller that great men
have been among them. Who would ever visit Lutter-
worth but for Wycliffe ; and what traveller would
ever think of Chalgrove but for Hampden'a monument?
Cowper is East Dereham's one historic name. He
sleeps his last sleep in the parish church, but his most
real monument is the old house in which he lived, the
garden in which he loved to walk; the place where, as
he says in " The Casteway," he "waged with death a
lasting strife, supported by despair of life." It is hardly
credible that the people of a small town like Dere-
ham should let such a house be pulled down, and
all its memories scattered•to the winds. It may be
said that they mean to keep the memories. But how
are they to be kept? The spot has been purchased by
a religious body who are in want of a better place of
worship than they now possess, and who have resolved
to pull down the house and to erect on the site
a 'neat Gothic building," to be called the " ('owper
Congregational Church." Is it possible that the
excellent persons who have resolved on this way
of doing honour to genius, believe that the call-
! ing of thetr Church by Cowper's name will in any
! way associate it with Cowper's memory? Will the
! admirers of the poet—and they are even yet neither
few nor far between—make pilgrimages to it as to
Cowper's shrine? On the contrary, the name will for
ever keep in mind the fact that the real traces of Cow.
per's sojourn in Dereham were trampled out. The
people of Dereham will tell inquiring strangers
that the Church is not Cowper's Church ; that
it has no association with him but that of the
supplanter; and that has simply usurped his
name, after obliterating those traces of him which
were consecrated by his memory. Let the house stand,
and build the Cowper Church elsewhere, and the
legend will then be in after years that the Church was
built by men who had too much respect for the poet's
memory even to disturb the walls which had echoed
with his complaints, or the roof that had sheltered his
imaginary miseries.
We are not anxious to second the appeal which has
been made to the lovers of Cowper's poetry to come
forward and save this relic of him at a great price. It
is really more a question for the people of Dereharn
than for the public. If they choose to obliterate the
one footprint left among themby one of the immortals,
the lose is more theirs than the world's. There are
many memorials of Cowper, and the house at item'
ham is not the brighte..t. He went there only to die.
The gloom of his mental disease gathered around
him, and the only work he did in those three and a
half years was the translation of his Latin poem on the
Icebergs, the remodelling of a passage in his translation
of Homer, and the wiiting of the eleven verses of the
" Cdstaway." The neat living memorials of Cowper
are nearer home. The little village oft /Jury where he
lived so long, and where he formed that friendship with
the Evangelical Vicar, the Rev. J. Newton, to which
the world owes some of his most popular, if not his
most powerful, compositions, is the chief scene of his
literary activity, and is full of his memory. Lady
Heaketh once lent Miss Eanaliawe a poem of Cowper's
on condition that she should neither lend it nor copy
it. Miss Fanshawe sent it back with some stanzas
telling Lady Hesketh that she bad not copied it
by pen, but had committed it to memory. Cowper
replied that this was fame in the first degree.
He would be remembered as Homer is, only by his
works. As for those .-ad years at Dereham, it is not
he who would have wished that any traces of them
should remain. But the public will wish it, and the
wish, we believe, will be respected, because the
memory of such men is a national heritage, and the
people of East Dereham will assuredly know better
than to squander their own local share of it, in this
inconsiderate fashion.