COOPER, Abraham (1787-1868), an animal and battle painter, was the son of a tobacconist, and was born in London, in 1787. At the age of thirteen he became an employe at Astley’s amphitheatre, and was afterwards groom in the service of Sir Henry Meux. When he was twenty-two, wishing to possess a portrait of a favourite horse under his care, he bought a manual of painting, learned something of the use of oil colours, and painted the picture on a canvas hung against the stable wall. His master bought it and encouraged him to continue in his efforts. He accordingly began to copy prints of horses, and was introduced by Davis, the equestrian, to Benjamin Marshall, the animal painter, who took him into his studio, and seems to have introduced him to the Sporting Magazine, an illustrated periodical to which he was himself a contributor. In 1814 he exhibited his Tam O’Shanter, and in 1816 he won a prize of £100 for his Battle of Ligny. In 1817 he exhibited his Battle of Marston Moor and was made Associate of the Academy, and in 1820 he was elected Academician. He died in 1868. Cooper although ill educated, was a clever and conscientious artist; his colouring was somewhat flat and dead, but he was a skilful draughtsman and a master of equine portraiture and anatomy, and had some antiquarian knowledge. He had a special fondness for Cavalier and Roundhead work, and his best pictures are those in which he has reproduced the subjects of that period.
COOPER, Sir Astley Paston (1768-1841), a celebrated surgeon, was born at the village of Brooke, in Norfolk, August 23, 1768. His father, Dr Cooper, was a clergyman of the Church of England; his mother was the author of several novels. At the age of sixteen he was sent to London and placed under Mr Cline, surgeon to St Thomas’s Hospital. From the first he devoted himself to the study of anatomy, and had the privilege of attending the lectures of John Hunter. In 1787 he was appointed demonstrator of anatomy at St Thomas’s Hospital. In 1791 he delivered part of the course of lectures on anatomy and surgery at St Thomas’s Hospital. In this year he married; and in the spring of 1792 he visited Paris. In the latter year he was also appointed professor of anatomy to Surgeon’s Hall,—a situation which he again filled in 1794 and 1795. In 1800 he was appointed surgeon to Guy’s Hospital, on the death of his uncle, William Cooper. In 1802 he received the Copley medal for two papers read before the Royal Society of London on the destruction of the membrana tympani; and in 1805 he was elected a fellow of that society. Having taken an active part in the formation of the Medico-Chirurgical Society, he published in the first volume of its Transactions an account of an unsuccessful attempt to tie the carotid artery. Another of his remarkable attempts was to tie the aorta. In 1804 he brought out the first, and in 1807 the second, part of his great work on Hernia—the operation for which, on account of the defective knowledge of the local anatomy, was then frequently unsuccessful. So greatly did this work add to his reputation, that in 1813 his annual professional income rose to £21,000 sterling. He was soon after appointed professor of comparative anatomy to the Royal College of Surgeons. In 1820, he removed a steatomatous tumour from the head of George IV. About six months afterwards he accepted a baronetcy, which, as he had no son, was to descend to his nephew and adopted son, Astley Cooper; in 1827 he was elected president of the Royal College of Surgeons; and in 1830 vice-president of the Royal Society. He was also chosen member of the French Institute; the degree of D.C.L. was conferred on him by Oxford, and that of LL.D, by Edinburgh; and he was appointed sergeant-surgeon to the king. He died on the 12th February 1841, at the age of seventy-three. He was interred, by his own desire, beneath the chapel of Guy’s Hospital; and a statue by Bailey was erected to his memory in St Paul’s Cathedral.
His chief works are Medical Records and Researches (1798); On Hernia (1804-7); Dislocations and Fractures (1822); Treatise on the Anatomy and Diseases of the Breast (1829-40); Anatomy of the Thymus Gland (1832). See Life of Sir A. Cooper, by B. Coopçr.
COOPER, Charles Henry (1808-1866), the historian of Cambridge, was born at Great Marlow, 20th March 1808, being descended from a family formerly settled at Bray, Berkshire. He received his education at a private school in Reading. In 1826 he fixed his residence at Cambridge, and in 1836 was elected coroner of the borough. Four years later he was admitted a solicitor, and in course of time he acquired an extensive practice, but his taste and inclination ultimately led him to devote almost the whole of his time to literary research, and especially the elucidation of the history of the university of Cambridge. In 1849 he resigned the office of borough coroner on being elected to the town-clerkship, which he retained till his death on March 21, 1866. His earliest production, A New Guide to the University and Town of Cambridge, was published anonymously in 1831. The Annals of Cambridge followed, in 4 vols. 8vo, 1842-52, containing a chronological history of the university and town from the earliest period to the year 1849. His most important work, the Athenae Cantabrigienses, a companion work to the famous Athenae Oxonienses of Anthony à Wood, contains biographical memoirs of the authors and other men of eminence who were educated at the university of Cambridge. The work has not been completed; only two volumes have been published (in 1858 and 1861), embracing the period between 1500 and 1609. Cooper’s other works are The Memorials of Cambridge, 3 vols. 1858-66, and a Memoir of Margaret, Countess of Richmond and Derby, 1874, a posthumous publication. He was a constant contributor to Notes and (faeries, the Gentleman’s Magazine, and other antiquarian publications, and left an immense collection of MS. materials for a biographical history of Great Britain and Ireland.
COOPER, James Fenimore (1789-1851), an American novelist, was born at Burlington, New Jersey, on the 15th September 1789. Reared in the wild country round the Otsego Lake, on the yet unsettled estates of his father, a judge and member of Congress, he was sent to school at Albany and at New Haven, and entered Yale College in his thirteenth year, remaining for some time the youngest student on the rolls. Three years afterwards he joined the United States navy; but after making a voyage or two in a merchant vessel, to perfect himself in seamanship, and obtaining his lieutenancy, he married and resigned his commission (1811). He settled for a while at Westchester, the “Neutral Ground” of his earliest American romance, and produced anonymously (1819) his first book, Precaution, a novel of the fashionable school. This was followed (1821) by The Spy, which was very successful at the date of issue; The Pioneers, the first of the “Leatherstocking” series; and The Pilot (1823), a bold and dashing sea-story. The next was Lionel Lincoln (1825), a feeble and unattractive work; and this was succeeded in 1826 by the famous Last of the Mohicans, a book that is often quoted as its author’s masterpiece. Quitting America for Europe he published at Paris The Prairie (1826), the best of his books in nearly all respects, and The Red Rover, by no means his worst.
At this period the unequal and uncertain talent of Cooper would seem to have been at its best. These excellent novels were, however, succeeded by one very inferior, The Wept of Wishton-Wifih (1827); by The Notions of a Travelling Bachelor (1828), an uninteresting book; and by The Waterwitch (1830), one of the poorest of his many sea-stories. In 1830 he entered the lists as a party writer, defending in a series of letters to the National, a Parisian journal, the United States against a string of charges brought against them by the Révue Britannique ; and for the rest of his life he continued skirmishing in print, sometimes for the national interest, sometimes for that of the individual, and not infrequently for both at once. This opportunity of making a political confession of faith appears not only to have fortified him in his own convictions, but to have inspired him with the idea of imposing them on the public through the medium of his art. His next three novels, The Bravo (1831), The Heidenmauer (1832), and The Headman of Berne (1833), were designed to exalt the people at the expense of the aristocracy. Of these the first is by no means a bad story, but the others are among the dullest ever written; all were widely read on both sides of the Atlantic.
In 1833 Cooper returned to America, and immediately published A Letter to my Countrymen, in which he gave his own version of the controversy he had been engaged in, and passed some sharp censure on his compatriots for their share in it. This attack he followed up with The Monikins and The American Democrat (1835); with several sets of notes on his travels and experiences in Europe, among which may be remarked his England (1837), in three volumes, a burst of vanity and ill-temper^ and with Homeward Bound, and Home as Found (1838),. noticeable as containing a highly idealized portrait of himself. All these books tended to increase the ill-feeling between author and public; the press was virulent and scandalous in its comments, and Cooper plunged at once into a series of actions for libel. Victorious in all of them, he returned to his old occupation with something of his old vigour and success. A Naval History of the United States (1839), supplemented (1846) by a set of Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers, was succeeded by The Pathfinder, a good “Leatherstocking” novel; by Mercedes of Castile, and The Deerslayer (1841); by The Tua Admirals, and by Wing and Wing (1842); by Wyandotte, The History of a Pocket Handkerchief, and New Myers (1843); and by Afloat and Ashore, and Miles Wallingford (1844). From pure fiction, however, he turned again to the combination of art and controversy in which he had achieved distinction, and in the three Littlepage Stories (1845-6) he fought with a great deal of vigour. His next novel was The Crater, or Vulcan’s Peak (1847), in which he attempted to introduce supernatural machinery with indifferent success; and this was succeeded by Oak Openings and Jack Tier (1848), the latter a curious rifacimento of The Red Rover; by The Sea Lions (1849); and finally by The Ways of the Hour (1850), another novel with a purpose, and his last book. He died of dropsy at Cooperstown, New York, in his sixty-second year.
Cooper was certainly one of the most popular authors that have ever written. His stories have been translated into nearly all the languages of Europe and into some of those of Asia, and are even now found worthy the honours of a cheap reprint. Balzac admired him greatly, but with discrimination; Victor Hugo pronounced him greater than the great master of modem romance, and this verdict was echoed by a multitude of inferior readers, who were satisfied with no title for their favourite less than that of “the American Scott.” As a satirist and observer he is simply the “Cooper who ’s written six volumes to prove he ’s as good as a Lord” of Lowell’s clever portrait; his enormous vanity and his irritability find vent in a sort of dull violence, which is exceedingly tiresome. It is only as a novelist that he deserves consideration. His qualities are not those of the great masters of fiction; but he had an inexhaustible imagination, some faculty for simple combination of incident, a homely tragic force which is very genuine and effective, and up to a certain point a fine narrative power. His literary training was inadequate; his vocabulary is limited and his style awkward and pretentious; and he had a fondness for moralizing tritely and obviously, which mars his best passages. In point of conception, each of his three-and-thirty novels is either absolutely good or is possessed of a certain amount of merit; but hitches occur in all, so that every one of them is remarkable rather in its episodes than as a whole. Nothing can be more vividly told than the escape of the Yankee man-of-war through the shoals and from the English cruisers in The Pilot, but there are few things flatter in the range of fiction than the other incidents of the novel. It is therefore with some show of reason that The Last of the Mohicans, which as a chain of brilliantly narrated episodes is certainly the least faulty in this matter of sustained excellence of execution, should be held to be the best of his works.
The personages of his drama are rather to be accounted as so much painted cloth and cardboard, than as anything approaching the nature of men and women. As a creator of aught but romantic incident, indeed, Cooper’s claims to renown must rest on the fine figure of the Leatherstocking, and, in a less degree, on that of his friend and companion, the Big Serpent. The latter has many and obvious merits, not the least of which is the pathos shed about him in his last incarnation as the Indian John of The Pioneers. Natty Bumpo, however, is a creation of no common unity and consistency. There are lapses and flaws, and Natty is made to say things which only Cooper, in his most verbosely didactic vein could have uttered. But on the whole the impression left is good and true. In the dignity and simplicity of the old backwoodsman there is something almost Hebraic. With his naive vanity and strong reverent piety, his valiant wariness, his discriminating cruelty, his fine natural sense of right and wrong, his rough limpid honesty, his kindly humour, his picturesque dialect, and his rare skill in woodcraft, he has all the breadth and roundness of a type and all the eccentricities and peculiarities of a portrait.
See Griswold, Prose Writers of America, Philadelphia, 1847; Eclectic Magazine, 1851; J. R. Lowell, Fable for Critics; and American Literature, vol. i. p. 725.
