Edward Clarke was born into the large Boston family of merchant Richard Clarke and Elizabeth Winslow Clarke on November 6, 1737. He was their fourth recorded child, following William, Hannah, and Elizabeth, and was later joined by Joseph Lee, Mary, Jonathan, Susanna, Isaac Winslow, Sarah, Lucy, and Richard. His father had graduated from Harvard College and was building a prosperous importing business; his mother came from the influential Winslow family. Edward therefore grew up amid both commercial privilege and the expectations attached to a socially prominent New England household.

The surviving records disclose little about Edward’s childhood instruction. They do, however, illuminate the business environment in which he matured. Richard Clarke’s correspondence and accounts concerned voyages, prices, invoices, drafts, and the movement of tea, oil, molasses, sugar, potash, and other commodities among Boston, London, Canada, the West Indies, and coastal ports. A son entering such a firm would have needed facility with handwriting, arithmetic, bookkeeping, correspondence, and the complicated habits of credit that governed eighteenth-century trade. Edward’s name in the family papers indicates that he became involved in this commercial world rather than remaining merely a dependent member of the household.

By the 1760s, the business operated as Richard Clarke and Sons with Edward, Jonathan, and Isaac participating in the enterprise. An account book covering 1763 to 1770 includes Edward among the persons connected with the firm’s transactions. The papers also preserve a letter that Richard sent to Edward at Plymouth in 1768, evidence that Edward’s activities carried him beyond Boston and that father and son communicated about family or business affairs while apart. The surviving description does not establish the exact purpose of that stay, and it is safest not to infer more.

Edward died on February 27, 1770, only thirty-two years old. His early death came before the Tea Act and the violent controversy that later surrounded his father and brothers. Consequently, although he helped form the “sons” in the Clarke commercial house, he never became a public figure in the Boston tea crisis that made the firm historically famous.