Sarah Fellowes

Sarah Fellowes (d. 1832) was the daughter of Michael Pearson, the eminent London physician and friend of the Flowers (see letter 25). Her husband, John Fellowes (1765-1823), came from a prominent Unitarian family in Nottingham.  He earned a substantial income in the silk trade, aided by his ownership of a large hosiery mill in the Marsh.  In 1808 he founded the banking firm of Fellowes, Hart and Co., which later became a part of Lloyds Bank of London. A member of the Unitarian congregation at High Pavement, Fellowes was a leading political reformer in Nottingham during the early and mid-1790s and was actively involved in the Parliamentary election of 1796.  His politics not only brought him into contact with Flower (most likely through the medium of the Cambridge Intelligencer) but other radicals as well, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  When Coleridge toured the north of England in early 1796 promoting his new periodical, The Watchman, he boarded in the Fellowes’s home during his visit to Nottingham, preaching a charity sermon in the Unitarian chapel.  Fellowes took a leading part in securing subscribers for the Watchman in the Nottingham area.  After the failure of the Watchman, he procured a list of subscribers at a guinea a piece for Coleridge’s Poems, which appeared in May 1796.  Two letters from Coleridge to Fellowes have survived, dated 13 and 31 May 1796, in which Coleridge refers to Fellowes as one of the true “Friends of Liberty” for his hospitality in receiving “the itinerant Patriot” (Griggs 1.125-26, 131-32). Fellowes chaired the anti-Pitt meeting for Nottingham on 12 April 1797, offering stern criticisms of the Two Bills, Pitt, the war against France, and other matters of political reform (CI 22 April 1797).  In 1800 he purchased and rebuilt a large home on High Pavement, not far from the Unitarian chapel; among his numerous children were Charles, later Sir Charles Fellows, the eminent nineteenth-century explorer.  Mrs. Fellowes made much ado about her family’s churchgoing.  As John Crosby Warren comments, “I have been told, following the practice of many people of position in those days, [that Mrs. Fellowes would] pass on Sundays from her house on the High Pavement ... to the Chapel (which was then situated behind some houses on the South side of that street), followed by her children, two and two, and then by her coachmen and footman and women servants in the same manner, and while she and her children took their place in their pew on the ground floor, her domestics sat in the gallery above, and woe betide those who were absent without her permission” (26-27).