Sir Charles Abraham Elton, poet, translator and theologian, was born in Bristol on 31 October 1778, the eldest of three sons of the Revd Sir Abraham Elton (1755–1842), fifth baronet and heir to a large Bristol mercantile fortune, and his first wife, Elizabeth (d. 1822), daughter of Sir John Durbin, a Bristol merchant. Elton was a close friend of Charles Lamb, to whom he sent many of his literary works. His The Brothers: a monody focuses on the tragic death of his two sons by drowning at Weston-super-Mare in 1819 demonstrates a keen ear for poetry. Landor could never read the touching couplet —
‘That night the little chamber where they lay
Fast by our own, was silent and was still’ —
contained in it, without being moved to tears. In this volume, as in his first published work Poems (1804), are many poems which use Bristol and its environs as a setting, including the sonnet ‘St Mary Redcliff’.
Following his wife's death in 1830, Elton published no more verse, living a largely secluded life. In 1842 he succeeded to the baronetcy and to the picturesque family house, Clevedon Court, Somerset. He died in Bath on 1 June 1853; the funeral took place on 7 June at Clevedon church, where he was buried.
