They became companions for
life. Cowper says they were as mother and son to each other; but Mrs.
Unwin was only seven years older than he. To label their connexion is
impossible, and to try to do it would be a platitude. In his poems
Cowper calls Mrs. Unwin Mary; she seems always to have called him Mr.
Cowper. It is evident that her son, a strictly virtuous and religious
man, never had the slightest misgiving about his mother's position.
The pair had to choose a dwelling-place; they chose Olney in
Buckinghamshire, on the Ouse. The Ouse was "a slow winding river,"
watering low meadows, from which crept pestilential fogs. Olney was a
dull town, or rather village, inhabited by a population of lace-makers,
ill-paid, fever-stricken, and for the most part as brutal as they were
poor. There was not a woman in the place excepting Mrs. Newton with
whom Mrs. Unwin could associate, or to whom she could look for help in
sickness or other need. The house in which the pair took up their
abode was dismal, prison-like, and tumble-down; when they left it, the
competitors for the succession were a cobbler and a publican.
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