Benjamin Flower, Newgate, to Eliza Gould, Mr. Gurney’s, Keene’s Row, Walworth, Friday, 20 September 1799.

Newgate 1. oclock. 

Friday.  Sep. 20. ‘99

   I tried, My Dear Eliza, as soon as I had breakfasted, this morning to settle to business, as I must part with my account books on Monday, it being necessary for my People to have them at Cambridge during Stirbitch Fair, when many accounts are to be settled—but I could do nothing.  I at length threw myself on the Sofa, took up the Letters to Literary Ladies, and had got to the middle of the last letter about poor Julia—(who by the way, I think has hardly justice done her), when the lad entered with the packet.  I threw down the book, read your Friend’s note—I wanted to get rid of the boy directly—but being obliged to write a line, I hastily siezed the first scrap of paper and the first pen I could lay hold of—wrote a line or two, which whether you or Miss G- could make out, I fear [God] only knows—put away the boy—and relieved myself in the only way I find relief when either grief or joy possess my soul.

   When I was a little tranquil, the Post brought me a letter from your father, I am glad it did not arrive an hour sooner.  What he says of you, would have encreased my anxiety to agony: but arriving after I had read Miss G-’s note, it had an effect the direct contrary.  My surcharged heart again sought relief—and again burst into tears.

   Happily I have had no one call on me the whole morning—I am now tranquil.  Well—I’ll mend my pen and see if I can write a page which will be toler­­ably decent.

   Mrs Creak, with her sisters the Miss Hensmans called on me yesterday, between 3 and 4—about the time we used to be eating fruit and drinking our glass of wine after dinner.  So were we doing the preceding Thursday.  They immediately observed I looked tolerably well, in health, but that my spirits were out of tune—inquired after you, and found out the cause.  They had heard nothing of your illness, but had hoped to have found you here.  I talked with them as well as I could, read an extract or two from some of your Letters.  They expressed the pleasure they expected in your acquaintance, and Mrs C- in particular hoped I should bring you to see her in Cornhill, as soon as I was out of prison.   The two single ladies return to Kimbolton to day. I had scarcely time sufficient to write my Newspaper paragraphs, as my Tea Company came rather early: I had likewise three gentlemen, two from Cambridge.  Mr B [Bannister] Flight called just before Tea, he had dined with the Walworth Sunday School Society, where he had seen Mr Gurney, who talking about you, said you was “mending.” I exerted myself as well as I could for the evening, and was in decent spirits.

   While writing the above, Mr Pearson of Spital Square has called on me.  My eyes having a strange appearance, he asked what was the matter with me.  My cold afforded me a most convenient apology, I took out my handkerchief, began blowing away, and saying what a very bad cold I had got.  By the way it is of no consequence.  I know I shall be well as soon as you are.  That’s sufficient, and you need make no farther inquiries about the matter.

   You really, my Dearest Friend, need not wonder at my alarm if you consider all circumstances.  You told me two months ago, your lungs had been aff­ected.  About one month since, you had a relapse, and was confined to your bed.  Now you have a still more severe attack of the same complaint.  Your letter of Monday gave me great hopes you were recovering.  Tuesday you complain of a shortness of breath, which however on the Wednesday, you say was not of long continuance, and that you were considerably better.  On the Thursday—That you breathe with less difficulty than yesterday—that your lungs were very weak,—and you faint and [are] languid from the loss of blood, from the application of leeches.  I recollected symptoms of somewhat for I now hope they were only somewhat of a similar kind—which had, in friends I valued, proved fatal prognostics.  I lost a Sister in my youthful days—difficulty of breathing was the first dangerous omen. Your spirits, and your piety, make me mention these circumstances to you, persuaded your mind is above being affected by them on your own account—But they made me tremble. The opinion of Mr Saumarez, is however so explicit, so favourable, and so heart reviving, that I trust my sufferings are at an end.  But I again both intreat and demand, that you neither talk, nor write, the former to any one, nor the latter even to me, so as in the smallest degree to retard your recovery.  When you are quite well enough to write me a short note, assure me you follow the instructions I have now laid on you, most implicitly.

   It was my intention to have enclosed this, in a Note to Miss Gurney, express­ive of my sincere thanks for her communications this morning.  But the interr­uption I have alluded to will if I do not immediately close, make me too late for the Post.  You have been very kind in providing a feast for my mind in the letters you have sent, and which I shall spend my afternoon in devouring.  Adieu!—Promising myself that the next note I receive, will still farther brighten my prospect. I conclude 

                                 Ever your

                                             B Flower

Text: Flower Correspondence, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth; for an annotated edition of this letter and the complete correspondence of Eliza Gould and Benjamin Flower, see Timothy Whelan, ed., Politics, Religion, and Romance: The Letters of Benjamin Flower and Eliza Gould, 1794-1808 (Aberystywth: National Library of Wales, 2008), pp. 116-118. 

Flower makes reference above to Letters for Literary Ladies, to which is added, An Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification (1795), by Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849).  The book also included Letters of Julia and Caroline, seven letters extolling the dangers of excessive sentimentality.  Flower would later collaborate with Joseph Johnson in 1806 in reprinting Edgeworth’s Moral Tales for Young People, first published in 1800. Mrs. Creak was the wife of Flower’s brief business partner from the early 1780s, William Creak.  Her sisters, the Misses Hensmans from Kimbolton, were old friends of Flower as well.  It was their mother, Mrs. Hensman, who treasured Flower’s youthful diary.

The physician Michael Pearson (1730-1806) resided at 34 Spital Square, a neighbor to two other families who were close friends of Eliza and Benjamin, the Haweses and the Goodalls.  Pearson came to London from Knock, near Appleby, in 1748. After studying medicine in Hatton Garden, he opened his own practice in Norton Falgate in 1758, eventually becoming one of London’s more successful physicians, including among his clients Horne Tooke and John Wilkes. In 1781 he removed to Spital Square into the former house of Lord Bolingbroke. In 1782 Dr. Hawes’s Humane Society awarded a prize medal to Pearson’s brother, Richard, a physician in Birmingham, for his dissertation on whether “putrefaction” offered “a certain criterion of death.”  Like Flower and so many of his friends, Michael Pearson was active in the reform politics of his day; he was a member of both the Revolution Society and the Society for Constitutional Information as well as an active participant in the effort to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts in 1789 (see Thomas W. Davis, Committees for repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (London: London Record Society, 1978), 40). His obituary notes that his “political principles were in all cases sound and constitutional,” always  “zealous in promoting the cause of freedom” (Monthly Repository [1806], 492). Pearson was also an active proponent of the abolition of the slave trade. Like Flower, Pearson was a Unitarian, attending for a time the ministry of the General Baptist William Vidler (1758-1816) at Parliament Court, London. Pearson subscribed to the Sunday School Society in 1789 as well as the Unitarian Fund in 1806. He was a friend and correspondent of William Wilberforce, one letter being an evaluation of the bout with madness experienced by Robert Hall c.1805-06. For the complete text of that letter on this site, click here.