Frances Jennings

Frances Jennings (1742-1824) shared her house in Bridge Street with Benjamin Flower between 1793 and 1800, when he was the editor and publisher of the Cambridge Intelligencer (he left upon his marriage on 1 January 1800 to Eliza Gould). Like Flower, she also operated a bookshop in her home (Universal British Directory [1791], vol. p. 492). She is usually referred to as "Miss Jennings," but sometimes as "Mrs. Jennings," but that term was often ascribed to older unmarried women at that time, for it does not appear that she ever married. She was the granddaughter of the Rev. Thomas Jennings (d. 1739), an Independent minister at Barrington and Eversden, Cambridgeshire.  His son, Miss Jennings’s uncle, was Nathaniel Jennings, an eminent surgeon at Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire, and a prominent deacon in the Independent church there.  His son was the Rev. Nathaniel Jennings, Indep­endent minister at Islington (see letter 119), the same church Flower’s older brother, William, attended in his later years.  Miss Jennings’s father, Thomas, was a successful apothecary in Cambridge. Her mother was the daughter of a leading deacon in the Indep­endent congregation at Downing Street in Cambridge during the ministries of Joseph Hussey and Dr. John Conder, the same church where Flower often worshiped after his departure from St. Andrew’s Street in 1798.  Miss Jennings was received into the congregation at Downing Street in February 1786 and remained a faithful member until her death in 1824.  Samuel Thodey, her pastor at the time of her death, in her funeral sermon described her doctrinal position as “decidedly evangelical.” She was a Dissenter “from enquiry and conviction,” yet even though “decidedly attached to our principles of faith and worship ... she was free from illiberality,” giving to “others the liberty she claimed for herself, and was ever ready and anxious to unite with christians of every name and party, in the furtherance of such common objects as might be pursued in concert without compromise of principle” (30). Though Miss Jennings, the Calvinist Independent, and her boarder, Benjamin Flower, the rational Dissenter and Unitarian and, at that time, a Particular Baptist, differed in matters of theology, they were both liberal in their approach to the essentials of faith and practice, refusing to divide over doctrinal differences. Like Eliza Flower, Frances Jennings was also distinguished “by her sympathetic attention to the afflicted and the poor” (see Samuel Thodey, The Hope of Immortality . . . A Sermon Occasioned by the Death of Mrs. Frances Jennings [Cambridge: J. Deighton, 1825], 30).   Flower found in her a worthy conversationalist, distinguished by her piety and high intellectual attainments, knowledgeable from her youth in devotional and religious materials of all kind, an outgrowth of her role as a bookseller in Cambridge. As Thodey notes, “Her mind, naturally strong, was well cultivated; she had been an attentive though a charitable observer of human life; her conversation was always distinguished by the spirit and vivacity of one who had mixed as an equal with intelligent society …” (Thodey 32).   “Many,” he adds, have “derived lasting benefit from her pious example and advice” (Thodey 33), a statement to which Flower would have readily assented. Miss Jennings appears frequently in the correspondence of Benjamin Flower. See Timothy Whelan, Politics, Religion, and Romance: The Letters of Benjamin Flower and Eliza Gould Flower, 1794-1808 (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, 2008).