Sarah Flower Adams

Sarah Flower Adams was an English poet, hymn writer, and member of William Johnson Fox’s Unitarian congregation at South Place Chapel in London. Born at Great Harlow, Essex, in 1805, she was the daughter of Benjamin Flower, a radical journalist, and the younger sister of composer Eliza Flower. After their father’s death, the sisters remained closely connected with Fox’s intellectual and religious circle. Sarah married the engineer and inventor William Bridges Adams in 1834.

Adams wrote poetry, religious verse, and prose. Her dramatic poem Vivia Perpetua appeared in 1841, and The Flock at the Fountain, a work for children, followed in 1845. For Fox’s Hymns and Anthems she contributed thirteen hymns, including Nearer, My God, to Thee. The Morgan Library preserves her signed autograph manuscript of the hymn dated November 1840, providing unusually strong evidence for its composition date. Fox published it in London in 1841.

Her sister Eliza supplied the hymn’s original musical setting for the South Place worship project. Sarah died in 1848 at only forty-three. Although her surviving hymns are comparatively few, Nearer, My God, to Thee carried her writing far beyond its original Unitarian setting and into a wide range of later Christian hymnals.