Flower of the Month – April 2024
1st April 2024
Sweet Peas – Flowers of April
Flower of the Month
“April – Tears and Smiles”
from “Songs of the Months”
published by A J Novello
December 1834
In nature the flower of the month is the Daffodil – the beginning of something new
YouTube Recordings of the Songs of the Months will be released online each month throughout 2024.
The composer of each of the 12 songs is Eliza Flower (1803 – 1846), who set poetry provided by her close knit circle of literary friends, mainly women, including her sister Sarah Flower Adams. The result is an eclectic mix of songs which veer from romantic to dramatic harmony and from simple beauty to lively humour.
The short editorial introduction explains that each song appeared throughout 1834 in the Monthly Repository – a publication associated with South Place Chapel where Flower’s life and work was based.
Eliza Flower
Composer, Singer and Pianist
BORN 19th April 1803, Harlow, Essex
Eliza Flower (1803 – 1846) was a composer, singer and pianist whose main body of work was created for the South Place Unitarian Chapel, London. She held very progressive views on women’s rights and education and profoundly influenced the preacher there – Rev. William Johnson Fox – along with many other intellectuals of her day including poet Robert Browning, writers Harriet Martineau and William and Mary Howitt, Thomas Southwood Smith (physician), philosophers Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill, musician and publisher Vincent Novello, artists William James Linton and Margaret Gillies, and academic Thomas Wade. The poet Catherine Bromley described her as:-
… a bewildering, fascinating, elusive being, the presiding genius in all the the social and musical activities of the chapel.
To find out more about her life and work please go to her page on the Minerva Scientifica Website https://minervascientifica.co.uk/eliza-flower/
