Lloyd, Charles

(1775-1839)

   Born in Birmingham, the son of Charles Lloyd the Quaker banker and philanthropist, he was groomed to take over his father's bank but turned to literature. He was a close fiend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (see entry), whose sonnet "To a Friend" on the birth of his son Hartley and his lines "To a Young Man of Fortune" are probably addressed to Lloyd. Suffering from some delusional mental illness, he was admitted to an asylum near York, possibly The Retreat (a Quaker hospital), from which he escaped about 1818 and made his way back to his home in Westmoreland. He and his wife died near Versailles and their nine children were scattered over the world. Some of his publications: Poems on various subjects, 1795. Poems on The Death of Priscilla Farmer, 1796. Poems, 1797. Blank Verse by Charles Lloyd and Charles Lamb. 1798. Translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, 1811. Nugae Canorae, 1819. Desultory Thoughts in London, 1821. Poetical essays on the character of Pope, 1821. Beritola, 1822. Poems, 1823. Some of his poems: "Address to a Virginian Creeper," "Lines," "Metaphysical Sonnet," "Stanzas to Ennui," "Written at the Hotwells, Near Bristol."

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. English Poetry: Author Search. Chadwyck-Healey Ltd., 1995 (http://www.lib.utexas.edu:8080/search/epoetry/author.html). Poems of Charles Lloyd. Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1823. Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (http://library.stanford.edu). The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse. Jerome J. McGann. Oxford University Press, 1993. The Romantic Era, List of Poets (http://www.sonnets.org/romantic.htm).