Eliza Julia Andrews [later Flower]

Eliza Julia Andrews [Flower] (1792-1861) was the sister of Crabb Robinson’s close friend Mordecai Andrews III (1780-1821), the nephew of John Towill Rutt (1760-1841). They were the children of Mordecai Andrews II (d. 1799), Independent minister at Coggeshall, Essex, from 1775 to 1797.  His father, Mordecai Andrews, Sr. (1715-50), pastored Independent congregations at White Row, Spitalfields, London, and at Market Harborough. Mordecai Andrews II married Elizabeth Rutt (1756-1841), sister of J. T. Rutt (both attended John Collett Ryland's academy at Northampton about the same time as Benjamin Flower attended). Eliza Julia Andrews lived with her brother in London for many years and appears often (as does her brother) in Robinson's diary. During the years 1811-1817 she became friends with a number of literary women, including Mary Hays and Jane Mullett Tobin, Thomas Mullett's daughter, as well as his niece, Sarah Norton Biggs, and Hays's nieces who married Peter and George Wedd (also nephews of J. T. Rutt). In 1817, Eliza Andrews startled her friend Crabb Robinson and her family and traveled with George Flower (1786-1862), Benjamin Flower's nephews, and his relations, Elias Pym Fordham and Maria Fordham, to Morris Birkbeck’s fledgling English settlement at Albion, Illinois, in 1817. Along the way, she married George Flower, despite the fact that Flower was still legally married to his first wife in England, an indiscretion Crabb Robinson found intolerable and unforgivable, despite his high regard for Eliza Andrews. Richard Flower, brother of Benjamin Flower, also emigrated to Albion; he later wrote of his emigration experience in Letters from Lexington and the Illinois, Containing a Brief Account of the English Settlement in the Latter Territory, and a Refutation of the Misrepresentation of Mr. Cobbett (1819), and in Letters from the Illinois, 1820, 1821.  Containing an account of the English settlement at Albion and its Vicinity, and a Refutation of Various Misrepresentations, those more particularly of Mr. Cobbett (1822), to which Benjamin Flower attached a lengthy preface and notes. For more on Eliza Julia Andrews, see Janet R. Walker and Richard W. Burkhardt, Eliza Julia Flower: Letters of an English Gentlewoman: Life on the Illinois-Indiana Frontier 1817-1861(Muncie, IN: Ball State University, 1991).