Benjamin Flower

Benjamin Flower (1755-1829) was raised in Edward Hitchin’s Independent congregation at White Row, Spitalfields, London, where Benjamin’s father, George Flower, was a deacon. He attended John Collett Ryland’s academy in Northampton from 1766 to 1769, and was a member of John Ryland, Jr’s Secret Prayer Society. In a letter to his then fiancée Eliza Gould, Flower composed a lengthy tribute to his days at Ryland’s Academy: ‘Of four Schools which I went to in the course of six years, I will notice one only, at which I remained three years and an half, the master a most extraordinary eccentric character but for whose memory I shall ever retain a grateful and affectionate respect--the late Rev. John Ryland of Northampton.  He was a man of considerable strength of mind, but which was insufficient to restrain a wandering and an uncommonly vigorous imagination.  His passions and affections were warm, they would at times hurry him to excess; they mingled in every thing he did, and yet he had so much habitual good nature and benevolence, and his religious principles were so firm and influential, that I never saw any other ill effects even from his occasional follies of passion, than words & looks . . . But the methods of education at the school I am now alluding to, were in many respects so original, and so impressive, that I never yet heard, and never expect to hear of any school equal in those respects.  Religion was not made a task, we learned no catechisms.  Mr Ryland was a moderate Calvinist, he might have a bigotted attachment to one or two particular sentiments, but upon the whole, I scarcely recollect the man who had more true devotion, and extensive liberality and benevolence.  His short comments in the family on the Scriptures, his singular remarks, his striking sermons, his plain familiar way of teaching the evidences of Christianity—these upon the whole made those impressions upon me, that I think, what I am, under God, for rational sentiments on religion, free from enthusiasm on the one hand, and from scepticism on the other is principally to him’ (Benjamin Flower to Eliza Gould, 29 August 1799, in Whelan, Politics, Religion, and Romance). After working six years as the European agent for a manufacturer in Tiverton, Flower became the first and only editor of the Cambridge Intelligencer, which he published from 1793 to 1803. He removed to Harlow in 1804, where he operated a printing business until 1815. In 1819, he retired with his two daughters, Eliza and Sarah, to Dalston, Hackney, where he died in 1829.  While in Cambridge he was an attendant (and occasionally the hymn leader) of Robert Hall’s congregation at St. Andrew’s Street from 1793 to 1798, having been a friend and ardent admirer of Hall’s predecessor, Robert Robinson. In 1799 Flower spent six months in Newgate prison for libeling the Bishop of Llandaff in an editorial in the Intelligencer. While in prison, he met his future wife, Eliza Gould (1770-1810). She grew up in Bampton, Devon, where her father was a deacon in the local Baptist church. In 1799 (when she met Flower) she was living in London in the home of Joseph Gurney (1744-1815), a deacon at Maze Pond and the father of William B. Gurney (see letter 267). During their years at Harlow, the Flowers attended the Baptist meeting at Fore Street; Flower, his wife, and two daughters are all buried in the Baptist cemetery in Foster Street, Harlow. Among his publications are The French Constitution: With Remarks on Some of its Principal Articles … and the Necessity of a Reformation in Church and State in Great Britain, Enforced (1792); National Sins Considered, in Two Letters to the Rev. Thomas Robinson ... to Which are Added a Letter from the Rev. Robert Hall, to the Rev. Charles Simeon … (1796). See Timothy Whelan, Politics, Religion, and Romance: The Letters of Benjamin Flower and Eliza Gould Flower, 1794-1808 (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, 2008), xiii-xlvii.