Author: Lloyd, Charles
Biography:
LLOYD, Charles (1775-1839: ODNB)
Lloyd was born at his parents’ house, 45 Egbaston Street, Birmingham, 12 Feb. 1775, the eldest son of Mary Farmer (d 1821) and her husband, Charles Lloyd (1748-1828), a wealthy Quaker banker and realtor. He was baptized in the Church of England on 25 Apr. 1799. Educated privately, he commenced medical studies at Edinburgh in 1794, but “nervous fits” drove him back to Birmingham within a few months. Indicative of his unsettled state, in his 1795 poem “The Maniac” he wrote of “gestures so wild and forlorn.” An incident occurred between him and Mary Wollstonecraft’s friend Mary Hays (1759-1843) in which, Lloyd claimed, she had offered herself to him; he later admitted he had lied. He cruelly satirized her in his 1798 roman-à-clef, Edmund Oliver. He lived with the poet Coleridge (q.v.) from mid-1796 to summer 1798, contributed to Coleridge’s Poems (1797), and, with Charles Lamb (q.v.), to Blank Verse (1798). In 1798, he entered Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (no degree). At St Bartholomew, Birmingham, on 24 Apr. 1799, he married Sophia (1776-1830), a daughter of the Lloyds’ Edgbaston Street neighbours Samuel and Rebecca Pemberton. Together, they had five sons and four daughters. Now living in the vicinity of Windermere, he became reacquainted with Southey—they first met in 1797—and befriended Wordsworth and de Quincey (qq.v.). In 1794, his parents had consulted Erasmus Darwin (q.v.) about his nervous distress and in 1797 he resided at Darwin’s Lichfield sanatorium. Mental illness caused him to be confined at William Tuke’s humanely-run asylum in York, “The Retreat,” first in 1811 upon the death of his brother Robert, and again in Mar. 1816. In Apr. 1816 he ran away to London, was returned, and again escaped in 1818, now to Grasmere. He was for a time under the care of John Willis at Willis and Darling’s institution at Skellingthorpe, Lincoln. Stable through most of the 1820s, his mental illness returned in the 1830s. He died at Chaillot, near Versailles, on 16 Jan. 1839. (ODNB 20 May 2023; ACAD; M. R. Trimble, “Charles Lloyd: Epilepsy and Poetry,” History of Psychiatry [Aug. 2000], 235-343; H. Lloyd, Quaker Lloyds and the Industrial Revolution [2006]) JC