Daughter of so­li­ci­tor Hen­ry Al­ing­ton Pye and Char­lotte Yer­burgh, Char­lotte be­came one of the most suc­cess­ful and pro­lif­ic bal­lad com­pos­ers of the 19th Century. Af­ter at­tend­ing a “Vo­cal and Mis­cel­lan­e­ous En­ter­tain­ment” at the Man­sion House in Louth in 1838, she de­clared that she would be­come a po­et and writ­er. And, a lit­tle over a year lat­er when her fa­ther, the War­den of Louth, car­ried out the old cus­tom of dis­trib­ut­ing cloth to poor wo­men, Char­lotte wrote a 20-verse po­em to com­mem­o­rate the oc­ca­sion. By 1847, she was well enough known that when the new rail­way sta­tion was built at Louth, she was asked to lay the cor­ner­stone.

Charlotte ma­rried Charles Bar­nard in 1854, and they lived at The Firs in West­gate, though Charles was par­son of St. Olave’s in Ruck­land. Fol­low­ing Char­lotte’s pres­ent­a­tion at court in 1856, the cou­ple moved to Pim­li­co in Lon­don. Among their neigh­bors was Mi­chael Cos­ta, con­duc­tor at Co­vent Garden, where Charlotte of­ten at­tended.

Charlotte’s first pub­lished song was a mu­sic­al set­ting of “The Brook,” by Tennyson.

Sources

Music

1. Barnard
2. Brocklesby