Richard Cobbold was an English author and cleric. He is best known for his novelised account of the life Margaret Catchpole, who had once been a servant for his parents.
The son of an Ipswich brewer, John Cobbold, and his wife Elizabeth (née Knipe), Richard Cobbold was born in 1797, the same year Margaret Catchpole was tried and convicted for the theft of one of his father's horses. Though the twentieth of John Cobbold's twenty-two children, Richard was educated well, attending King Edward VI Grammar School, before matriculating at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He graduated BA in 1820 and was ordained a deacon the same year. In 1824, his father purchased the living of Wortham, Suffolk, to provide for Richard and his family.
Richard Cobbold was strongly influenced by his mother (who died in 1824), a poet and artist with social and charitable interests. In the early 1840s, Cobbold took the letters Margaret Catchpole had written to his mother and wove them into a highly romantic "biography," which was in fact a novelised embellishment on Margaret's life. The book, published in 1845, would be a best-seller which remained in print into the twentieth century, though Cobbold had sold his copyright for only £1000.
Cobbold published a number of further novels, though without the success he had enjoyed with The History of Margaret Catchpole. After selling his living at Wortham to raise money for his sons to marry, he continued to serve as a clergyman until his death.
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