Background
Born in Birmingham, Charles Lloyd II was the eldest son of Charles Lloyd, the Quaker banker and philanthropist. He was educated by a private tutor with the idea that he would work at his father’s bank, but finance bored him.
Born in Birmingham, Charles Lloyd II was the eldest son of Charles Lloyd, the Quaker banker and philanthropist. He was educated by a private tutor with the idea that he would work at his father’s bank, but finance bored him.
His best-known poem is "Desultory Thoughts in London". Instead he turned to poetry, his first publication appearing in 1795. Soon after he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge and moved in with him, Coleridge agreeing to instruct him in return for £80 a year.
Coleridge introduced him to Charles Lamb, and the two supplied introductory and concluding verses to his next volume of poetry.
A new edition of Coleridge"s poetry included poems by Lamb and Lloyd, and referred to the friendship of the authors. Soon after, however, in November 1797, an author signing himself Nehemiah Higginbotham savagely parodied the three of them in the Monthly Magazine.
This author turned out to be Coleridge himself. That same year he published a volume of verse in collaboration with Charles Lamb.
Around 1811 Charles Lloyd started suffering from auditory hallucinations and "fits of aberration" that resulted in his being confined to an asylum.
In 1818 he escaped and turned up at De Quincey’s cottage, claiming to be the devil, but managed to reason himself out of that conviction. A flurry of literary activity followed with the publication of Nugae Canorae (1819), Desultory Thoughts in London, Titus and Gisippus, and Other Poems (1821), and Poetical Essays on the Character of Pope (1822). A small volume of poems in 1823 ended this burst of creativity, and from that time almost nothing is known of him.
He died near Versailles in 1839.