Mrs. Eddy Mentioned Them March 23, 1957 Issue

Adelaide Anne Proctor, 1825–1864

[Mentioned in the Message to The Mother Church for 1900, p. 11]

In their day, the poems of Adelaide Proctor were as well known as Tennyson's. Her lyrics, published in 1858, went through nine editions in seven years.

The daughter of the writer Brayan W. Proctor, whose nom de plume was Barry Cornwall, Miss Proctor published her first poems when she was eighteen. As a tiny child, before she could write, she loved poetry so much that her mother copied the child's favorite verses into an album for her. She was a precocious child, easily learning several Euclid problems. Her remarkable memory helped her in mastering French, German, and Italian.

Under the name of Mary Berwick, she contributed to Household Words, a weekly conducted by Dickens. He accepted her first offering and asked for more, but he did not know her real identity until he visited her home, where in reading one of her poems to her father, the latter exclaimed that it was his daughter's. She had reasoned: "If I send him, in my own name, verses that he does not honestly like, either it will be very painful to him to return them, or he will print them for papa's sake, and not for their own. So I have made up my mind to take my chance fairly with the unknown volunteers." In these words one glimpses two of her outstanding characteristics—her independence and honesty. Her poems were characterized by a spirit of courage and humanity. Many of them were set to music; "A Lost Chord" being one of the most popular.

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Adelaide Anne Proctor, 1825–1864

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