It’s Eyre Crowe’s 200th birthday!
The writer William Makepeace Thackeray became friendly with the Crowe family in the 1830s in Paris. When Eyre Crowe was struggling to make money from art in the late 1840s and early 1850s Thackeray paid him to take dictation and engrave illustrations. In 1852-1853 Crowe accompanied Thackeray as his secretary on his lecture tour of America. In 1893 Crowe published his reminiscences of the trip in ‘With Thackeray in America’. Four years later, he published another book, ‘Thackeray’s Haunts and Homes’. In this book, he described how he heard of Thackeray’s early death in 1863. “on the day before Christmas came the announcement of his death, terrible in its suddenness to those, like myself, who had only his countless benefactions to dwell upon.”
Images: Pages from Eyre Crowe, ‘Thackeray’s Haunts and Homes’ (1897), my own copy. Title page; facsimile of letter from Thackeray to Crowe, 1849; sketch of Thackeray’s house, 36 Onslow Square, in which Crowe’s sister Amy also lived in the 1850s, as a companion and governess to Thackeray’s two daughters. Photograph f 36 Onslow Square today, and Thackeray’s grave at Kensal Green cemetery.
Eyre Crowe (1824-1910) 