Author: GOWER, Mrs.
Biography:
GOWER, Mrs. (fl 1819)
A manuscript note in a copy of Poems on Various Subjects identifies the author as Mrs. Gower and the preface to that book states that she also wrote Lines from the Pen of a Young Lady. She lived in Kent but has not been identified and it is not known if Gower was her birth or married name. The title page of Poems on Various Subjects gives some of her history: she had become incurably deaf at the age of eight. Her Lines from the Pen of a Young Lady is a response in verse to Nathaniel Gundry’s A Short Address to the Inhabitants of Ramsgate on the Distribution of the Sacrament Money Which has been Collected at the Chapel, Ever Since its Consecration (1819). The reference is to the Ramsgate chapel of St. Lawrence at Thanet, Canterbury; the curate was the Rev. Richard Harvey whom Gandry accused of misappropriating the sacrament money. Mrs. Gower’s poem describes the curate as profaning “the sacred garb he wears.” SR