Bowman was the youngest of seven children of Thomas Bowman of the small
Yorkshire town of
Richmond. Thomas was a printer and bookseller, having tried his hand at different ways of earning money including selling patent medicines and perfumes, and working at various times as a clerk to the Commissioners of Taxes and as a magistrates' clerk. Bowman was educated at Richmond School under the famous headmaster
James Tate. In 1824, aged 16, he moved to Newcastle and began to work as a druggist at Robert Currie's shop at 19 Sandhill. In 1834, he set up in business as a bookseller, like his father, in partnership with Currie, buying the established bookshop at 32 Collingwood Street. They sold books on art, natural history, theology and general subjects, branching out into publishing, and also acting as a depot for the
Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Bowman married Ellen Pattinson, daughter of the
industrial chemist Hugh Lee Pattinson and Phoebe Walton. Her sisters married Bowman's business partner Isaac Lowthian Bell, and another of Bell's business partners,
Robert Stirling Newall: all three brothers-in-law were members of Tyneside Naturalists' Field Club and the Natural History Society of Northumberland. His body is buried in the Pattinson family vault in
Washington, County Durham. ==References==