Personal Life
Bowring married twice. By his first wife, Maria (1793/4–1858), who he married in 1818 after moving to London, he had five sons and four daughters (Maria, John, Frederick, Lewin, Edgar, Charles, Edith, Emily, and Gertrude). She died of arsenic poisoning in 1858. His eldest son, John Charles Bowring, presented Bowring's collection of coleoptera to the British Museum after his death. His fourth son, Edgar Alfred Bowring, was a Member of Parliament for Exeter from 1868 to 1874. E.A. Bowring is also known as an able translator in the literary circles of the time. Lewin Bentham Bowring was a member of the Bengal Civil Service, private secretary in India to Lord Canning and Lord Elgin, and commissioner of Mysore.
His daughter, Emily, became a Roman Catholic nun, Sister Emily Aloysia Bowring. She was the first headmistress of the Italian Convent School (now known as the Sacred Heart Canossian College) in Hong Kong, serving from 1860 to 1870.
Bowring married his second wife, Deborah Castle (1816-1903), in 1860: they had no children. Deborah Bowring was a prominent Unitarian activist and supporter of the women's suffrage movement.
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