Author: Bowden, John William
Biography:
BOWDEN, John William (1798-1844: ODNB)
Born in London on 21 Feb. 1798, he was the eldest son of John Bowden (1764-1844), a wealthy businessman and Bank of England director, and his wife, Mary Anne (Roberts) Bowden, whose parents and maternal grandparents were slave-owning planters in St Kitts. Bowden was educated at Harrow and then at Trinity College, Oxford (BA 1820, MA 1823), where he befriended John Henry Newman (q.v.). Newman stated in his Apologia that he passed his undergraduate years “almost exclusively” with Bowden. In 1819, he collaborated with Newman on a poem on the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Published in the Undergraduate newspaper, the poem contains anti-Catholic sentiment that he and Newman soon set aside. In 1826 he was appointed to his only regular employment as a commissioner of stamps. Two years later, on 7 June 1828 he married Elizabeth Swinburne (1805-1896), a daughter of Sir John Swinburne; her brother Charles was the father of Algernon Swinburne, the poet. As the author of Tracts for the Times numbers 5, 20, 30, 56, and 58, Bowden played an important role in the High Church Oxford Movement. He also published articles in BC on church subjects and on Gothic architecture, a Life of Gregory the Seventh (1840), and a tract opposing the private ownership of pews in the Church of England. Along with Newman and other friends, Hurrell Froude, John Keble, and Robert Wilberforce, Bowden contributed hymns to the British Magazine that later were collected in Lyra Apostolica (1836). Each of the four children by his marriage with Elizabeth, and Elizabeth herself, entered the Roman Catholic church. His two boys, John (F. W. Faber’s biographer) and Charles, became members of the London Oratory; one of his girls, Marianne, entered the Westbury Visitation Convent. Bowden died of tuberculosis on 15 Sep. 1844 at his father’s residence in Grosvenor Place. The poet Swinburne’s father was an executor of his estate (valued at probate at £99,641 6s 11d). Other than close family, the only person to receive a legacy from him was his maternal cousin Manuel John Johnson (1805-1859), superintendent of the Oxford Ratcliffe Observatory. Following his death, Elizabeth continued to be one of Newman’s cherished correspondents. Newman supplied a biographical preface to Bowden’s posthumously published Thoughts on the Work of the Six Days of Creation (1845). (ODNB 24 June 2023; PROB 11/2004) JC
Other Names:
- J. W. Bowden