Public Record Office clerk. Served as assistant commissioner of Great Exhibition, 1851; under his superintendence, in connection with Paris Exhibition, 1867, was issued The Imperial Paris Guide. Claimed to have originated "journalistic gossip" (Hatton, Journalistic London, p. 89). Author of Apsley House (verse), 1853, dated from Garrick Club. Editor of Memorials of Henry the Fifth, 1858.

Cole's H.W. article describes the hazards of fire, flood, and destruction by vermin to which the documents stored in the Tower of London, in the Rolls House and Chapel in Chancery Lane, in the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey, and in Carlton Ride were exposed. Cole was employed in the Carlton Ride repository at the time that the article appeared (British Imperial Calendar, 1850). About a fourth of the text of the article is taken from Henry Cole, "Neglect of the Public Records", Westminster Review, April 1849.

Nonesuch Letters mentions, but does not give the text of, a letter from Dickens to Charles Cole, September 5 1860 (addressee's name given in index as Charles A. Cole). The letter, to appear in Pilgrim Letters, concerns material submitted by Cole to A.Y.R. The material referred to is the articles titled "Five Hundred Years Ago", published in A.Y.R., October 6, October 27, December 1 1860. The articles are clearly by Charles Augustus Cole; the first mentions the documents on English history brought out "during the last three years" under the direction of the Master of the Rolls. Cole's edition of Memorials of Henry the Fifth was one of the publications thus issued.

Cole and Dickens were acquainted, as indicated by Dickens's letter to Cole, August 7 1862.

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