Mordecai Cubitt Cooke

[5] Between the age of ten and thirteen he was taught by his uncle, James Cubitt, a Baptist minister, in Ilford then Stratford upon Avon.

His aunt Naomi Treen (née Cubitt), a teacher at a Pestalozzian primary school encouraged him to take up teaching.

[1] Cooke joined Edward Step (1855–1931) in publishing the magazine Hardwicke's Science-Gossip: A Monthly Medium of Interchange and Gossip for Students and Lovers of Nature from 1865 to 1893.

[7] From 1872 to 1894 Cooke also edited Grevillea, a monthly record of cryptogamic botany and its literature, a periodical devoted to mycology.

He was a founder of the Quekett Microscopical Club in 1865, in response to a request in Science-Gossip, and a founding member of the British Mycological Society.

It has been suggested that Cooke's description of the perceived distortions of the size of objects while intoxicated by the fungus Amanita muscaria (commonly known as the fly agaric or fly amanita), in his books The Seven Sisters of Sleep and A Plain and Easy Account of British Fungi, inspired the passage in Lewis Carroll's 1865 popular children's storybook Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, where Alice grows or shrinks on eating parts of the mushroom.

They had no children but Sophia's two-year-old illegitimate daughter, Annie Elizabeth Thornton Biggs (1844–1920) grew up in their household.

Sophia remainded with her husband through out this period, living from 1870 at 146 Junction Road, Kentish Town and dying in 1897.