Chapter Clare to Cleveland of C by Biographical Dictionary of English Literature

Clemens, Samuel Langhorne (“Mark Twain”) (1835-1910).—American Humourist, born at Florida, Missouri. After working as a printer and as a Mississippi pilot, he became a journalist in San Francisco. The result of a tour to the Mediterranean was The Innocents Abroad (1869). Other works were The Jumping Frog (1867), Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), A Tramp Abroad (1880), Life on the Mississippi (1883), Huckleberry Finn (1885), The £1,000,000 Bank Note (1893), Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900), and Christian Science (1907). In the midst of his success he was overtaken by a heavy financial disaster through the failure of a publishing firm of which he had become a partner. He however set himself to work off his liabilities. Though his humour was often rather mechanical or rough, it was often keen, subtle, and based on serious principles. In 1907 he visited England, and was received with enthusiasm, and among other distinctions received from Oxford the degree of LL.D.

Cleveland, John (1613-1658).—Poet, son of an usher in a charity school, was born at Loughborough, and educated at Cambridge, where he became College tutor and lecturer on rhetoric at St. John’s, and was much sought after. A staunch Royalist, he opposed the election of Oliver Cromwell as member for Cambridge in the Long Parliament, and was in consequence ejected from his college in 1645. Joining the King, by whom he was welcomed, he was appointed to the office of Judge Advocate at Newark. In 1646, however, he was deprived of this, and wandered about the country dependent on the bounty of the Royalists. In 1655 he was imprisoned at Yarmouth, but released by Cromwell, to whom he appealed, and went to London, where he lived in much consideration till his death. His best work is satirical, giving a faint adumbration of Hudibras; his other poems, with occasional passages of great beauty, being affected and artificial. The Poems were published in 1656.