The contributor may be Henry (later Sir Henry) Cole, 1808-1882 (D.N.B.), welI-known public official, one of whose strong interests was music. As a young man Cole helped Thomas Love Peacock write critiques of musical performances. Later, he was instrumental in founding the National Training School for Music. He advocated an increase in congregational singing in churches and was successful in inducing church officials to institute week-day musical services. He hoped to make England again what she had once been—"a musical nation" where "people had their glees and madrigals, which contributed to the happiness of men and women" (Fifty Years of Public Work, I, 365ff; II, 357ff).

Whether or not Henry Cole was a contributor to H.W., he had, in one way or another, a connection with several articles in the periodical. His "Neglect of the Public Records", Westminster Review, April 1849, served in part as the text of "The Adventures of the Public Records". His enumeration of the thirty-five "official stages, so far as they can be made out, which an inventor must undergo in obtaining letters patent" formed the basis of Dickens's "A Poor Man's Tale of a Patent". (Dickens read Cole's report in proof-sheets; it was shortly thereafter published by the Society of Arts in Rights of Inventors, 1850) Various proposals made by Cole (as "Denarius") in his pamphlet Shall We Keep the Crystal Palace and Have Riding and Walking in All Weathers among Flowers—Fountains—and Sculpture, 1851, were quoted in Morley's article "What Is Not Clear about the Crystal Palace".

Author: Anne Lohrli; © University of Toronto Press, 1973.