William Cowper

Cowper suffered from grave bouts of depression all his life, the kinds that had sent him to asylums but living with Morley Unwin and his wife Mary Unwin helped him recover from these attacks from time to time.

After Unwin’s death, Cowper stayed with Mary Unwin and he moved with her wherever she moved to live. Sometime before Unwin’s death, the duo settled in East Dereham.

He was seized with dropsy in 1800 and passed away of the same. He is buried in the chapel of St. Thomas of Canterbury, St. Nicholas Church, East Dereham.

William Cowper was born on November 26, 1731 in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England, to Ann and Rev. John Cowper. His father was a rector of the Church of St. Peter as well as a chaplain to George II.

His mother died in 1737 at the age of thirty four, when he was only six years old. His father had seven children in total and only one other, apart from Cowper, grew up to adulthood, John.

Before his mother’s death, Cowper attended a dame’s school but upon her sad demise, he was sent to a boarding school.

For a brief period of time, due to the inflammation of his eyes, Cowper was put into the care of an oculist but when he felt better, he was sent to a Westminster school. His schoolfellows included, Warren Hastings, Colman, etc.

When he turned 18, he started working at a solicitor’s office in Ely Place, Holborn, and met Thurlow, who was a fellow clerk and the future lord chancellor. Thurlow helped Cowper to realize his ambition.

For the 3 years that Cowper worked in Ely Place, he visited his uncle Ashely in Southampton Row and fell in love with his cousin Theodora. But his father was opposed to the relation and it left him in distress.

His cousin, Major Cowper, nominated him to a clerkship in the House of Lords in 1763 and it consisted of a preliminary appearance at the bard of the house.

The prospect made him very anxious and he tried to kill himself by consuming poison. And after trying to commit suicide on three other occasions, he was sent to a lunatic asylum.

After coming out of the asylum after 18 months, he settled in Huntingdon with a retired clergyman Morley Unwin and his wife Mary. In 1779, after a gospel devote, John Newton, invited him to write a hymnbook, ‘Olney Hymns’ was published.

The book contained hymns like, ‘Praise for the Fountain Opened’, ‘Light Shinning out of Darkness’, etc. Cowper’s ‘Olney Hymns’ as well as other hymns are now preserved in the Sacred Harp.

Cowper’s ‘The Task: A Poem, in Six Books’ depicts the Evangelical spirit of the age that so beautifully that according to one critic, "As Paradise Lost is to militant Puritanism, so is The Task to the religious movement of its author's time."