Author: Flowerdew, Alice
Biography:
FLOWERDEW, Alice, formerly SUDLOW (1759-1830: ancestry.co.uk)
Evidence from the Subscribers List of Poems (1803) establishes that she was almost certainly the Alice Sudlow baptised on 27 Apr. 1759 at Middlegate Congregational, Great Yarmouth, the daughter of Benjamin Sudlow (1715-87), watch- and clockmaker, and his wife Susannah Collet (1723-62), who had married in 1745. She was apprenticed milliner in 1772 at Great Yarmouth. She married Daniel Flowerdew, a widower from Hauxton, Cambridgeshire, on 22 May 1785, at Great Yarmouth. They had at least two daughters and a son. He was always in financial difficulties and died in Mar. 1801, still plagued by debt and under house arrest, under the rules of the Fleet Prison. Nineteenth-century reports that he was briefly a government official in Jamaica may be true but for the most part he worked as a minor official at the Customs House, London, and sometime broker. After his death she published Poems (1803) by subscription, hoping to raise enough money to maintain a ladies’ boarding-school she had just opened at 1 The Terrace, Upper Street, Islington. (Her unmarried sister Susanna was probably the Miss Sudlow who subscribed for three copies and John Dawson Copland, William Godwin’s friend, who had married her sister Elizabeth, also subscribed for multiple copies.) She ran the school with her unmarried daughter Anna Maria (1794-1838). They later moved to Bury St. Edmunds and then Whitton, Ipswich, possibly to be near her other daughter, Elizabeth, whose husband Frederick Francis Seekamp would later become Mayor of Ipswich. She died at Whitton on 23 Sept. 1830. Her daughter Anna Maria died there in 1838. Her hymn “Fountain of Mercy! God of Love!”, first published in Poems (1811), was widely admired and reprinted.(ancestry.co.uk 21 Jul. 2021; Freereg https://www.freereg.org.uk 21 Jul. 2021; European Magazine Apr. 1801, 319; Ipswich Journal 25 Sept. 1830; Charles Rogers, Lyra Britannica [1867]; Gleanings from the Sacred Poets [1875]; John Julian, A Dictionary of Hymnology [1892]; Copsey; NDWW) AA
Other Names:
- A. Flowerdew
- Mrs. Flowerdew