Author: Stow, John
Biography:
STOW, John (1776-1864: Boase)
He was born in 1776 in East Ham, Essex (now East London), the son of William Stow, wholesale grocer. Two Ancestry trees give his mother as Ann Flory but there is no supporting documentation. He was educated at Richard Valpy’s (q.v.) school at Reading, Berkshire (1784-92). His widowed mother later moved to Greenwich and he was articled to a solicitor in London. He later practised at Old South Sea House, Broad Street, City of London. He may have ceased to practise law around 1820 and become an accountant and Special Correspondent in a wholesale house. His strange autobiography, A Hermit’s Narrative of Opinions (1861), records his three marriages (pp. 268-309). He married first Naomi Dorothea Hurdis on 8 June 1821 at St. Alpheage (or Alfege), Greenwich, Kent. She died on 11 Aug. 1831 at Greenwich. He then married Maria Margaret Torriano, daughter of Captain Hillary Harcourt Torriano of the EIC Engineers, on 20 June 1832 at St. Andrew-the-Less, Cambridge. She was also a poet and he printed some of her poems in A Hermit’s Narrative. She died of cholera in Cambridge on 15 July 1835. He married Henrietta Elizabeth Bohun on 16 July 1839 at St. Mary’s, Lewisham, London. There is no recorded issue from any of the marriages. The Hermit’s Narrative includes an annotated list of the vast number of presentation copies of his various "theological works" to the great and the good and leading institutions, including the most distant parts of the Empire via the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and the Church Missionary Society, shining “Gospel Light in the Dark Places of the Earth” (p. 147). Titles include Thoughts on the Gospel of Jesus, Thoughts on the Liturgy of the Church of England, etc. He died on 1 Jan. 1864 at Croom’s Hill, Greenwich, leaving an estate of around £12,000. His wife Henrietta died in 1878. (Boase, 6: 635; MH 9 June 1821; SJC 13 Aug. 1831; Cambridge Chronicle 29 June 1832, 24 July 1835; Morning Post 6 Jan. 1864; LES 2 Mar. 1878; Henry Alexander Glass, The Story of the Psalters [1888], 135-8) AA