Saffery, Attwater, Whitaker History

Historical and Biographical Narrative of the Primary

Individuals in the Reeves Collection

I

In the West Country of England between 1720 and 1840 a remarkable circle of nonconformist women writers emerged in the vicinity of Salisbury and eventually stretched to Bristol, Southampton, London, and Leicester. The circle encompassed three generations of women writers, beginning in Broughton with three Baptist women: the diarist Anne Cator Steele (1689-1760); her talented stepdaughter and poet, Anne (1717-78), who published Poems, on Subjects Chiefly Devotional in 1760 under the nom de plume ‘Theodosia’; and her other daughter, Mary (1724-72), also a gifted poet but whose style differed significantly from that of her more famous sister. The second generation was led by Mary Steele (1753-1813), Anne Cator Steele’s granddaughter and Anne Steele’s niece, whose reputation as a poet, though eclipsed by (and later even confused with) that of her aunt, was sufficient to sustain her own coterie of literary friends, including Mary Scott (1751-93) of Milborne Port, Somerset, author of The Female Advocate (1774); Jane Attwater (1753-1843) of Bodenham, Wiltshire, a prolific diarist; and Elizabeth Coltman (1761-1838) of Leicester, Steele’s close friend during her later years. The third generation centered upon the poet Maria Grace Andrews (1772-1858) and her sister, Anne (1774-1865), who came to Salisbury from London in the early 1790s, eventually becoming close friends with and, through their marriages, relations of the Steele and Attwater families. Manuscript and printed materials related to these women was deposited by Marjorie Reeves and her executors in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the Angus Library, Regent’s Park College, Oxford. Those materials now comprise the Reeves Collection, Bodleian (the subject of this calendar), and the Reeves Collection, Saffery/Whitaker Papers, and the Attwater Papers, Angus Library. Other related materials can be found in the Steele Collection, Angus Library.[1]

The Steele Collection was donated to the Angus Library in 1992 by Hugh Steele-Smith (1920-99), the final caretaker of an impressive body of manuscript and printed materials dating from the late 1600s through the mid-1850s, beginning with William Steele II and ending with the children of Anne Steele Tomkins (1769-1859), niece of the poet Anne Steele. Tomkins’s granddaughter, Selina Bompas (1830-1921), maintained the collection until her death, after which it came into the possession of Steele-Smith. Once the Steele Collection was deposited at the Angus Library, Marjorie Reeves (1905-2003), fellow and tutor in history and education at St. Anne’s College, Oxford (1952-72), began collating these materials with the enormous collection of manuscripts in her possession relating to the Attwater, Whitaker, Saffery, and Reeves families of Wiltshire, as well as some materials relating to the Steeles. Thomas Whitaker, younger brother of Philip Whitaker (husband to Anne Andrews Whitaker) married Sophia Williams (d. 1890) and settled at Yew Trees in Bratton. After his death in 1857, Philip’s grandson and Thomas’s nephew, John Saffery Whitaker (1840-1915) (along with his wife, the former Mary Brinkworth) came to live at Yew Trees with his aunt Sophia. It was his youngest daughter, Jane Saffery Whitaker, who collected and preserved the majority of the materials eventually discovered by Marjorie Reeves in the attic at Yew Trees and later deposited into the Angus and Bodleian libraries.[2] Reeves’s two studies, Sheep Bell & Ploughshare (1978) and Pursuing the Muses: Female Education and Nonconformist Culture 1700-1900 (1997), were based upon portions of these manuscript collections. Though Reeves did not review all the material in the Steele Collection, she was familiar with more of it than anyone except Hugh Steele-Smith.[3] As a result of her work, aided by Steele-Smith’s extensive research on Anne Steele as well as the admirable work of John Broome,[4] Reeves was able to identify the major personages in the Steele-Attwater-Whitaker-Saffery circle and briefly introduced their writings in several articles besides her two books.[5]

The Steele Circle: Biographical Background

Anne Cator Steele (1689-1760) was the second wife of William Steele III (1689-1769), and stepmother to Anne Steele and William Steele IV (1715-85) (Mary Steele’s father) and mother to Mary Steele Wakeford (1724-72). Anne Cator Steele maintained a diary from the 1720s until her death in 1760, but only three volumes, covering the years 1730-36, 1749-52, and 1753-60, remain extant, now residing in the Steele Collection. Her diary reveals much about the early life of Anne Steele, including her education, early poetic efforts, and frequent illnesses. Anne Cator Steele and her husband fully supported Anne Steele’s decision to remain unmarried and devote herself to her poetry. More importantly, Anne Cator Steele’s diary reveals her own spiritual travails as the wife of a minister and prosperous timber merchant in the West Country in the first half of the eighteenth century.[6] Her contemporary, Mrs. John Walrond (fl. 1699-1708), with the wife of the Revd John Walrond, who served for many years as a Presbyterian minister at Ottery St. Mary, Devon, before moving to the Bow (Presbyterian) meeting in Exeter in 1729, where he remained until his death in 1755. Little is known of his wife, but in the 1690s she began keeping a diary. Selections from 1699 to 1708 (as well as some from the 1730s), along with some spiritual meditations, were transcribed (in an unknown hand) into a bound volume, now belonging to the Steele Collection, also containing the poetry and meditations of Hannah Towgood Wakeford (1725-46).[7] Hannah Towgood was the daughter of Stephen Towgood (d. 1777), minister to the James’s Meeting (Presbyterian) in Exeter, 1743-77. She was the first wife of Joseph Wakeford (1719-85), a linen draper and banker from Andover and a leading member of the Independent congregation in Andover. They married on 15 July 1745 at Clyst Honiton, Devon; their only daughter, also named Hannah, was christened at Andover’s East Street Independent Chapel on 26 July 1746. The birth of the child, unfortunately, brought on the premature death of her mother at the age of twenty-one. Hannah Wakeford left behind a significant collection of poems, letters, and prose meditations, some published in TheChristian’s Magazine in the 1760s, and others left in manuscripts, copied (in an unknown hand) into the bound volume (mentioned above) now residing in the Steele Collection.

Anne Steele (1717-78), the original center of the Steele literary circle, was the daughter of William Steele III and his first wife, Anne Froude (1684-1720). She published as ‘Theodosia’, but within the Steele circle her literary appellation, derived from the classical pastoral tradition, was ‘Silviana’. Her brother, William, was known as ‘Philander’, and her half-sister, Mary, was ‘Amira’. Anne’s mother died when she was three, but her stepmother, Anne Cator Steele, treated her as her own daughter. Anne never married, devoting herself instead to her family and her poetry. Poems on Subjects Chiefly Devotional was published in London in 1760, and reprinted in Bristol in 1780 in a posthumous edition of the same title, which also added a third volume, Miscellaneous Pieces, in Verse and Prose, edited by Caleb Evans (1737-91), Baptist minister and educator at Bristol and a close friend of the Steeles. Besides these volumes, numerous hymns by Anne Steele appeared in nearly every hymnal published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A thin volume, Verses for Children, was published posthumously in three editions in 1788, 1803, and 1806. This was followed by an American edition of the three-volume Bristol edition, The Works of Mrs. Anne Steele … comprehending Poems on Subjects chiefly Devotional: and Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose and Verse: heretofore published under the title of Theodosia, 2 vols (1808); a selection of her works also appeared in Daniel Sedgwick’s Hymns, Psalms, and Poems, by Anne Steele (1863; reprinted in 1882). Louis F. Benson contended in 1915 that Anne Steele was the ‘foremost Baptist hymn-writer’. J. R. Watson has gone even further, arguing that Anne Steele is the first major woman hymn writer of any denomination. As Richard Arnold notes, ‘Admittedly, many of [Steele’s] hymns have by now fallen out of use, but the fact remains that for more than a hundred years from the time of their first appearance they ranked with those of the three or four most widely read hymn-writers’.[8] Sedgwick’s 1863 edition was prefaced by a biographical sketch of Anne Steele composed by John Sheppard (1785-1879) of Frome, a Baptist writer and friend of the Steele family. J. R. Broome reprinted this edition in 1967, adding new information on Steele’s life in his Introduction, material later developed into his important biography of Steele, A Bruised Reed (2007).[9]

Mary Steele Wakeford (‘Amira’) (1724-72) was the natural daughter of William Steele III and his second wife, Anne Cator Steele, and thus half-sister to William Steele IV and Anne Steele. In 1749 she became the second wife of Joseph Wakeford (d. 1785), bearing four children (one died in infancy, the other at 13). Her poetry sharply contrasts the more polished poetry of her sister, often exhibiting a comic, even satiric, bent, laced with a fair amount of self-deprecation. Like her mother, Mary Wakeford also kept a diary, but only a few entries copied by one of her descendants remain extant. She contributed to some poetic dialogues and competitions with her sister and some of their literary friends. A collection of thirteen poems, composed between 1748 and 1769, can be found in a small MS volume titled ‘Poems on Devotional Subjects’, along with eight other occasional poems on loose folia, can be found in the Steele Collection.[10]

Mary Steele (1753-1813), known within the family circle as ‘Polly’ and among the other members of the Steele circle as ‘Silvia’ or ‘Sylvia’, was the only daughter of William Steele IV (1715-85) and his first wife, Mary Bullock Steele (‘Delia’) (1713-62). Mary Steele was primarily educated by her aunt, Anne Steele, before completing her education at Mrs. King’s nonconformist boarding school for young girls in London. After the death of her father in 1785, she remained with her stepmother and her two half-sisters in Broughton House, becoming head of the household after her stepmother’s death in 1791. Her marriage in 1797 to the Baptist minister Thomas Dunscombe (1748-1811) was not a happy one, but she continued to write poetry, a process she began in earnest as a thirteen-year-old in 1766. Of her nearly 150 poems, only five appeared in print during her lifetime, including her longest poem, Danebury: or The Power of Friendship, a Tale (1779), as well as one prose piece, none with her named attached. Among her poems are tributes to two of the leading female poets of the 1780s, Helen Maria Williams and Anna Seward. Her poetry and letters provide extensive details about her relationships with various family members, especially her father, sisters, and her favorite niece, Mary Steele Tomkins; her fellow poets Mary Scott and Elizabeth Coltman; her close relation, Jane Attwater; and her friend, Caleb Evans of Bristol. Steele writes in nearly every poetic genre available to poets in the eighteenth century, including the ode, sonnet, elegy, occasional verse, verse narrative, historical verse romance, and poems on the themes of retirement, nature, friendship, and religious meditation.[11]

Mary Scott (1751-1793), Mary Steele’s close friend, and Anne Steele are the only two women writers in these volumes to receive at least a modicum of critical attention.[12] Scott (‘Mira’ or ‘Myra’) was the daughter of John Scott (1721-74), a linen merchant in Milborne Port, Somerset. Though raised a Calvinist in the local Independent chapel, she would later become a Unitarian, like her brother, the Revd Russell Scott of Portsmouth. After the death of her father in 1774, she continued to care for her mother, despite her engagement in May 1777 to John Taylor (1752-1817), tutor at the nonconformist academy at Daventry. Eight months after her mother’s death in October 1787, Mary Scott and John Taylor were married. They had two children, Mary Ann (1789-1875) and John Edward (1791-1844), the latter the founder of the Manchester Guardian in 1821. After Taylor’s marriage to Scott, he served as minister to the Presbyterian congregation at Ilminster before converting to Quakerism in 1790. He eventually became a schoolmaster in Bristol, where Mary Scott Taylor died in June 1793 due to complications from pregnancy. Scott is best known today for her two long poems, The Female Advocate (1774), a poem celebrating the achievements of women writers from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century, and Messiah (1788), a poem chronicling the life and death of Christ. Three poems by Scott bbelong to the Steele Collection and a few others appeared in a memoir of her son in 1844 and in an essay by Herbert McLachlan in 1950. A collection of her letters appeared in Isabella and Catherine Scott’s A Family Biography (London, 1908), though the originals, along with numerous manuscript poems, are no longer extant.[13]

Elizabeth Coltman (1761-1838) was the youngest daughter of John (c.1715-c.1800) and Bridget Coltman (1716-1802) of the Newarke, Leicester. She had two sisters: Anne (1753-88), who attended boarding school in Hackney at the same time as Mary Steele, and Mary (1757-1834), who married John Grew of Birmingham and emigrated to America in 1795. Coltman never married, but lived in comfortable affluence all her life, traveling on many occasions to see Mary Steele at Broughton, taking excursions to the Lake District (of which she published an account in the Monthly Magazine), and visiting other friends in various places, including London. She met Mary Scott, the Attwater sisters, and Mary Steele’s younger half-sisters and Wakeford cousins during her visits to Broughton, and joined with them in writing poetry. She also introduced Mary Steele to her own coterie of women writers and socialites in Leicester, including Susanna Watts (1768-1842), Elizabeth Heyrick (1769-1831), Catherine Hutton (1756-1846), and Mary Reid (1769-1839).[14] Two prose pieces by Coltman appeared anonymously in the Monthly Magazine, one of which included three poems; her other publications were moral tracts designed for young people, some of which also contained poetry. Elizabeth Coltman’s publications have been confused with the writings of her Leicester friend and abolitionist writer, Elizabeth Heyrick. Coltman authored at least five works, either anonymously or with title pages designated ‘E**** C******’. These works include Plain Tales: Chiefly intended for the Use of Charity Schools (1799; 1801; 1806); The Warning. Recommended to the Serious Attention of all Christians, and Lovers of their Country (c. 1805, 1807); Instructive Hints, in Easy Lessons for Children (1806); Familiar Letters Addressed to Children and Young Persons of the Middle Ranks (1811); and The History of Jenny Hickling: An Authentic Narrative (numerous editions after 1815).[15]

Marianna Attwater (1749?-1832) (‘Maria’) was the daughter of Anna Gay (1710-84) and Thomas Attwater (1691-1767) of Bodenham. Her grandmother, Jane Cator Gay (1680-1756) was the sister of the diarist Anne Cator Steele (see above). Thomas Attwater died in 1767, leaving Anna Attwater in Bodenham with Jane and Marianna. Caroline Attwater (‘Dorinda’ as she was known in the Steele circle), their older sister, had married Thomas Whitaker (1735-84) of Bratton on 10 January 1765. They would move to Bratton, where they became one of the leading families in the local Baptist church. Thomas’s relation, Jeffrey Whitaker (1703-75), had operated a school for boys in Bratton for almost forty years.[16] Caroline and Thomas Whitaker had six children: Philip (1766-1847), who married Anne Andrews in 1798; Anna (1768-79) and Mary (1773-1800); Thomas (1776-1857), who married Sophia Williams; and Anna Jane (1784-1838), who never married, living with her mother at Bratton. Caroline lived the final forty years of her life as a widow. Her husband had been a prosperous farmer, and his two sons (and at least one grandson and great-grandson) would also become large landowners and farmers in the Bratton area.[17] After her marriage to Philip Whitaker in 1798, Anne Andrews Whitaker (1774-1865) found in Caroline Whitaker a second mother to replace the one she had lost in 1791, and remained close to her mother-in-law until the latter’s death in 1824. Marianna Attwater married George Head (d. 1785), a clothier from Bradford-on-Avon, in January 1773, and apparently did not write any poetry after her marriage. Prior to her marriage, she was very active within the Steele circle, visiting often at Broughton and writing all her extant poetry between 1768 and 1770, poetry that circulated throughout the Steele circle. She was particularly close to Anne and Mary Steele, but was also known to Mary Scott and Elizabeth Coltman. None of her twenty poems appeared in print in her lifetime, but her work is of high quality, employing both sacred and secular themes, expressed at times with great seriousness and at other times with a sharp wit.[18] Marianna’s younger sister, Jane (‘Myrtilla’) (1753-1843), Mary Steele’s close friend and relation, married Joseph Blatch (d. 1840) of Bratton in 1790. Jane Attwater was primarily a diarist, beginning her entries in 1767 and continuing them into the early 1830s. She did write some poetry, however, most of it embedded within her diary (they appear like poetic effusions); other occasional poems were scattered among her extensive manuscript collection. Attwater’s long life spans the entirety of the literary activity of the women in the Steele and Saffery circles. She is present, along with Mary Steele, Mary Wakeford, and Mary Scott, in the original coterie surrounding Anne Steele; she continues in the next group that centers upon Mary Steele, Mary Scott, and Elizabeth Coltman of Leicester; and between 1790 and her death in 1843, Attwater (now Mrs. Blatch) was intimately involved with Anne Whitaker and her sister, Maria Grace Saffery (1772-1858), the latter having married Attwater’s former pastor in Salisbury, John Saffery (1763-1825), in 1799. As a member of this final coterie, Jane Attwater Blatch witnessed the uniting of the Attwater-Whitaker-Andrews families, the final link in this coterie of West Country women writers. Her diary chronicles her spiritual doubts and victories, her difficulty accepting her own ‘election’, her unusual fifteen-year courtship with Joseph Blatch, and the closeness they enjoyed as a married couple for fifty years. She also writes about numerous events in the lives of her family members and those of the Steele family, including an agonizing account of the final months in the life of her only child, Anna, who died of consumption in 1809. The diaries of Jane Attwater and Anne Cator Steele are the most complete extant examples of life writing among nonconformist women in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.[19]

Sophia Williams (1790-1891) was Caroline Whitaker’s daughter-in-law and, like her mother-in-law and aunt Jane, she was also a diarist. She was born into a staunch Baptist family in Bratton. Her father, Thomas Williams (d. 1817), was a deacon in the same church attended by the Whitakers and Blatches. In the 1780s he had joined with Revd Cooper, the local Baptist minister, to continue Jeffrey Whitaker’s school for boys; the school burned in 1789, however, the year before Sophia’s birth. Her diary is clearly the work of a well-educated young woman, suggesting that she, like many of the other women in this series, attended a boarding school for nonconformist girls, although it is possible she was educated by her father, himself a teacher. Sophia had at least one brother, Henry, who was living in the Islington area of London c. 1818. Even though he was not a believer, after her father’s death in 1817 she and her mother would live with him for several months. In accordance with her doctor’s orders, she returned to Bratton in July 1818, and in 1824 (most likely after her mother’s death), she married Thomas Whitaker (1776-1857), Philip Whitaker’s younger brother and the youngest son of Caroline Attwater Whitaker. Thomas and Sophia moved into a house called Yew Trees, on the Lower Road of Bratton, not far from Philip Whitaker and his family at Bratton Farm or her close friend Anna Jane Whitaker (1784-1838), Philip’s youngest sister. Thomas and Sophia did not have children, and when he died in 1857, Sophia invited Joshua Whitaker’s son, John Saffery Whitaker (1840-1915), and his new wife Mary Brinkworth to live with her at Yew Trees. Their daughter, Jane Saffery Whitaker, collected most of the material that now comprises the Reeves Collections in the Angus and Bodleian libraries, Oxford, as well as the Attwater Papers and the Saffery/Whitaker Papers, Angus Library, Oxford.[20]

Two lesser women also figured in Steele/Saffery circles, though in a more tangential way. Elizabeth Saffery (1762-98) was the daughter of the Revd Joseph Horsey (1737-1802), Particular Baptist minister at Portsea, 1773-1802. She married John Saffery, at that time also living at Portsea, and in 1790 they moved to Salisbury where he commenced his pastoral duties at the Baptist meeting in Brown Street, the same church Jane Attwater attended. Elizabeth died after a prolonged illness in May 1798. Included among the manuscripts in the Angus Library and the Bodleian is her diary from the final year of her life, as well as several letters addressed to her by Anne and Maria Andrews prior to their marriages.[21] Frances Barrett Ryland (b. 1761) was raised in a Baptist family in London. Her father, William Barrett, died in 1774, after which it appears she may have spent time teaching in a female academy while attending the Baptist congregation in Carter Lane, at that time led by John Rippon. At some point in the mid-1780s she removed to Northampton to teach in the female academy there conducted by Mrs. Trinder, a member of the Baptist church in College Lane. Trinder’s school had existed since 1765 in collaboration with the male academy operated by John Collett Ryland (1723-92) during his ministry as pastor at College Lane. J. C. Ryland closed his academy after the spring term in 1785, resigned from the church that November, and departed for Enfield, just outside of London, where he and his chief assistant (and son-in-law), John Clarke, had already established a new academy. Clarke’s son, John Cowden Clarke, would later befriend a young student at the academy, the future poet John Keats. John Ryland, Jr. (1753-1825) replaced his father as pastor at Northampton, remaining there until December 1793, when he removed to Bristol to become pastor of the two congregations (Baptist and Independent) at Broadmead, succeeding Caleb Evans (1737-91), the close friend and correspondent of Anne and Mary Steele.

During her time at Mrs. Trinder’s, Barrett became close friends with the first wife of John Ryland, Jr. Ryland had married the former Elizabeth Tyler, daughter of Robert Tyler of Banbury, on 12 January 1780; she died of consumption on 23 January 1787, leaving him with a young son, John Tyler Ryland, born 9 December 1786. Frances Barrett records in her diary that she attended to Mrs. Ryland on her deathbed and later including in her diary memorials on the anniversary of her friend’s death. Barrett married Ryland on 18 June 1789. About a year after her marriage and shortly after the death of her friend Mrs Trinder, Frances Ryland decided to continue Trinder’s school in her own house. She disbanded the enterprise in 1793 upon her removal to Bristol, and no record exists that she ever operated a school again. Her first three pregnancies ended in either a miscarriage or the death of the infant. Nevertheless, between 1797 and 1803 she gave birth to one son and three daughters. Jonathan Edwards Ryland (1797-1866) would become a leading writer among the Baptists in the early to mid-nineteenth century, best known today for his biographies of his father as well as the Baptist essayist John Foster.[22] The Rylands were friends of John Newton, evangelical vicar at St Mary Woolnoth, London, and the biblical commentator Thomas Scott and his wife, the former Mary Egerton, all evangelical Anglicans. The Rylands were also close friends of John and Maria Saffery and her sister, Anne Whitaker.[23]

Two other women writers, both evangelical Anglicans and close friends of some of the women in the Steele and Saffery circles, deserve attention as well. The previously mentioned Mary Egerton Scott (c. 1765-1840) served for a time as a governess/teacher in the school operated by Mrs Andrews at Isleworth in the late 1780s, where she contributed significantly to the education of both Maria Grace and her sister Anne. She became the second wife of the biblical commentator Thomas Scott in November 1790.[24] The marriage was a clear breach of the generally accepted time of bereavement for a widow or widower, and many in London, both friends and strangers to Scott, thought the action highly inappropriate. After their marriage, the Scotts continued as friends and spiritual advisors to the Andrews sisters, who by 1793 were now moving in Baptist circles both in Salisbury and London (represented by the Safferys in Salisbury and the family of Saffery’s brother-in-law, John Shoveller, who lived in London, 1791-5). Though membership and baptism into the Baptist church in Brown Street was not something the Scotts found necessary or advisable, they did not deem it a sufficient cause for any diminution in their friendship with Maria and Anne. Communications between Mary Egerton Scott and the Andrews sisters continued long after their marriages to Philip Whitaker and John Saffery in the late 1790s; in fact, during the late 1820s, one of Anne Whitaker’s sons attended a boarding school operated by Thomas Scott, Jr., at Gawcott.[25]

In 1825, four years after the death of Thomas Scott, Mary Scott remarried, this time to a Mr Dawes, an event that apparently did not sit well with John Scott and his siblings. Relations between Mary Scott and her stepson John, now a minister and schoolmaster at Hull, may have been poor by the time of Thomas Scott’s death in 1821. The next year, in his biography of his father, the younger Scott included at the end of his volume an advertisement of some works still in print by his father, and a listing of the five printed works by Mary Scott, identified only as ‘Written by Mrs. *****,’ her identity still hidden from her titles after more than two decades. Among her writings are The Path to Happiness Explored and Illustrated (London, 1796 and 1797; American edition, 1798); The Happiness of having God for a Friend in Time of Trial, or the History of Mrs. Wilkins. Addressed to Pregnant Women (London, 1797); The Advantages of Early Piety: or the History of Sarah Thompson and Lydia Green (1806); Plain Truth for Plain People; or, Dialogues between Joseph Chisel and Thomas Wood (1807); and finally, Memoir of Elizabeth Moulder, Who Resided Nearly Thirty Years in the Family of the Rev. Thomas Scott (1822). At least two of these titles were still in print by the Religious Tract Society throughout the 1820s.[26]

Jane Houseman (1768-1837), the former Jane Adams of Langton, Leicestershire, would, like Mary Egerton Scott, Maria Andrews Saffery, and Frances Barrett Ryland, become the second wife of a minister, in her case the Revd Robert Houseman (1759-1838). Houseman met his first wife, a Miss Audley, while a student at St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1783 (he took his B.A. in 1784). Though the Audleys were ardent nonconformists (Independents), they were, like Houseman, also committed evangelical Calvinists. Houseman and Miss Audley were married in January 1785; their marriage was short-lived, however, for she died later that year while giving birth to a son. At that time, Houseman was ministering in a parish church in Lancaster, and on two occasions in 1785 he and his wife paid visits to Elizabeth Coltman at Leicester. Mrs. Houseman’s brother, John Audley (1750-1827), a prosperous woolstapler (and later solicitor) in Cambridge, eventually proposed to Coltman, but she rejected him. Audley, however, maintained his connections with the Houseman’s thereafter; in fact, Houseman’s only son by his first wife (and Audley’s nephew) would later be hung for committing forgery against Audley in 1815. Jane Adams Houseman’s great-grandson was the poet/scholar A. E. Housman (1859-1936).[27]

After the death of his first wife, Houseman spent several years serving various parishes in and near Langton, Leicestershire, where he met and eventually married Adams in September 1788. She had received an exceptional education under the private tutelage of Thomas Robinson, the popular evangelical clergyman in Leicester and friend of Robert Hall. Her father was Anglican, but for many years he worshiped with the Methodists at Ashby-d-la-Zouch, where the Adamses lived. Her mother became a follower of George Whitefield, an allegiance that caused her father to disinherit her. Fortunately, she was taken in by the Countess of Huntingdon and became her godchild. As Houseman ministered at Langton between 1787 and 1795, he continued his friendship with Coltman, a friendship that now included a close relationship between her and Jane Houseman. In 1796 Houseman returned to Lancaster as rector at St. Anne’s Church, a position he retained until 1836. His biographer noted that his wife ‘was attentive and affectionate; as a mother, full of the tenderest and most enduring attachment; as a friend, earnest, steady, and disinterested. A sincerer, more benevolent, more truly humble and fervent Christian, never breathed. Her life was a uniform course of practical piety, ever active, ever self-denying....’[28] He was obviously familiar with her writings as well, noting that she had ‘a quick imagination, great candour of heart and mind, uncompromising honesty of purpose, and determined will to execute it’, accompanied by ‘a more than ordinary skill in discriminating minute and subtle differences of character’.[29] Both Houseman and her friend, Elizabeth Coltman, were deeply religious, employing their energy and creativity to educate and evangelize, both young and old, among the working class of England and America and, through the efforts of the missionary societies, India and the Caribbean. Both women may well have been involved with reform politics in the 1790s, but by 1815 Houseman, at least, had become decidedly non-partisan in her politics. Both women, however, were bent on directing their energies toward solving social ills and effecting moral and spiritual transformation, not political change. Her religious tract, Religion without Learning: or, The History of Susan Ward, appeared sometime around 1817, about the same time as Coltman’s first version of Jenny Hickling.[30] Whether the two women challenged each other to write a tract for the Religious Tract Society is not known, but their tracts would become two of the most popular RTS tracts during the nineteenth century.

The Saffery/Whitaker Circle at Salisbury and Bratton

Volumes 5-8 of Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840, are heavily indebted to the materials in the Reeves Collection, Bodleian Library. Volume 5 contains more than 230 poems, published and unpublished, of Maria Grace Saffery, along with a small collection of poems by Anne Whitaker and Jane Saffery Whitaker (1805-84), Maria Saffery’s daughter and Anne Whitaker’s stepdaughter. Volume 6 is comprised of letters that passed between the two sisters, 1788-1846; a small collection of letters by Mary Egerton Scott to Maria, Anne, and their mother (1788-95); some forty letters addressed to Maria Saffery from Richard Ryland, his wife Harriet, his daughter Harriet and son Croft, 1805-14[31]; as well as a large number of letters that passed between Maria and Anne and various members of their immediate family and close friends, including a letter to Anne Whitaker by the poet Ann Taylor of Ongar in 1812.[32] Most of the manuscript poetry of Saffery and her relations as well as a significant portion of their correspondence have been calendared below. The remaining portions can be found in the collections at the Angus Library.

Previously published biographical accounts of Maria Saffery and Anne Whitaker, like the accounts of all the other women writers who appear in this series (except John Broome’s volume on Anne Steele), are inconsistent and generally inaccurate.[33] To his credit, John Julian, in his Dictionary of Hymnology (1892), attributed Cheyt Sing (1790) and a romance novel (though he did not name the novel) to Maria Saffery; nevertheless, he erred in believing her to be the daughter of Joseph Horsey, Baptist minister at Portsmouth, confusing her, of course, with John Saffery’s first wife, Elizabeth Horsey.[34] The DNB correctly places Maria’s birth in Newbury, Berkshire, but identifies her as the daughter of William Andrews of Stroud Green, Berkshire. Actually, Maria and Anne were the daughters of James Andrews (b. 1746) and his wife, the former Mary Harding (c. 1748-91). James and his brother William (b. 1743) were the sons of William and Sarah Andrews of Shaw, near Newbury. Letters by William (1765-1830) and Harriet (1769?-1830) Andrews, children of William Andrews, Jr., can be found in the Reeves Collection and have been published in volume 6 of Nonconformist Women Writers.[35] James and William were also relations of Sir Joseph Andrews II (1727-1800) of nearby Shaw House. On Sir Joseph’s death in December 1800, the Shaw estate and title were inherited by his nephew, also named Joseph, the son of his half-brother, the writer James Pettit Andrews (1737-97). Sir Joseph II and his wife were known to Marianna Attwater of Bodenham in the 1760s, as was the Harding family of Salisbury. Marianna’s 1768 poem, ‘To Lady Andrews with a present of Netting’, implies the presence of a Miss Harding, most likely Mary Harding, daughter of Samuel Harding of Salisbury (d. 1798).[36] She married James Andrews in 1770, and the couple had two daughters, Maria Grace (christened 30 November 1772) and Anne (born 23 June 1774, christened on 17 October 1774), both at Greenham, Berkshire.[37] Another heir of Shaw House, Joseph Andrews III (1768-1822), and his wife, Elizabeth Ann Hunt (1771-1822), were also known to Maria and Anne Andrews.[38] The two sisters would continue to pay visits to their cousins at Shaw into the 1820s.

Little is known of the early years of the Andrews sisters. At some point during the mid-1780s, James Andrews moved his family from Newbury to Isleworth, where they lived in the old Manor House ‘opposite the Mill’, the location to which many of the early letters in Volume 6 of NWW are addressed. Andrews operated the mill, employing several men, some appearing in the correspondence. In September 1794 the mill burned,[39] but it was insured and rebuilt, with Andrews continuing to operate it until c. 1804, when he retired to the West Country to live near his two daughters. Mary Andrews died sometime in 1791, and it does not appear that James Andrews ever remarried. Given the fact that she operated a boarding school for girls, it seems likely that Mrs. Andrews, like so many of the women in these families, also attended a boarding school. Like Frances Ryland, Mary Scott, Mary Egerton Scott, Elizabeth Coltman, Maria Saffery, Anne Whitaker, and possibly Sophia Williams, Mary Andrews put to work whatever education she had acquired (which, given the precociousness of her two daughters, must have been fairly exceptional) and opened a boarding school for girls in the Manor House sometime in the 1780s. Not only did she bequeath a love of education to her two daughters, but also a love of literature. Both girls were composing poetry in their teens, with Maria Grace completing Cheyt Sing by the age of fifteen and The Noble Enthusiast before her twentieth year.[40] Cheyt Sing was published in London (and sold in Salisbury) in 1790, and dedicated to the liberal Whig MP, Charles James Fox.[41] Singh, Raja of Benares, refused to pay the tribute Warren Hastings and the East India Company required of him, and he was accordingly removed from power and placed under arrest in September 1781. Upon his release, Singh gathered his forces and waged a brief war against Hastings and the Company’s army, but was defeated; he escaped again and eventually settled in Gwalior, where he died in 1810. His treatment by Hastings was one of the reasons for the latter’s impeachment by parliament in 1787, the same year Maria Grace Andrews composed her poem. She makes no effort to hide her sympathy with Singh or her dislike of Hastings, concluding her poem with a plea for more humane policies toward the people of India by the East India Company and the British army, basing her argument on Christian virtue and compassion as well as British ideals of liberty and equal justice.

At some point in the mid-1780s, Mary Andrews hired a young, well-educated assistant named Mary Egerton.[42] Egerton was the sister of Thomas Egerton, and John Egerton, with whom Thomas partnered from 1784-95. Thomas Egerton also operated the Military Library from 1796 to 1802,[43] for their father had been a military man. Egerton’s greatest claim to fame as a book publisher is the fact that he was the first London publisher of the novels of Jane Austen. During her time at Isleworth, Egerton became a close confidant to Maria and Anne Andrews, serving as both teacher and friend. By summer 1788 she had left Isleworth and was living in Grovesnor Square, London, but she remained a surrogate ‘sister’ to the two Andrews sisters for many years thereafter. As Anglicans, none of the Andrewses appear to have imbibed any of the evangelical sentiments circulating in London in the late 1780s, largely generated by the preaching of such evangelical divines as William Romaine, John Newton, and Thomas Scott. By 1789, however, James and Mary Andrews had been influenced by ‘rational Christianity’, with Mrs. Andrews leaning toward Arianism and her husband espousing Deism. By 1789, however, Mary Egerton had become an outspoken evangelical, and her commitment is evident in her letters to Mrs. Andrews in 1789 and 1790. While at Grosvenor Square, Mary Egerton attended the preaching of the great Evangelical Anglican vicar, John Newton, at St Mary Woolnoth and, closer to home, Thomas Scott at the Lock Chapel. In 1790 Egerton moved into the Scott home in Chapel Street, near Grovesnor Square, serving as an assistant to Mrs Scott and, most likely, some form of governess/teacher to her four young children. Thomas Scott, besides his preaching at Lock Chapel and some other locations in London, was labouring under a severe deadline for the completion of his multi-volume Commentary on the Bible (published in 1792).

In September 1790, just a few months after Egerton had commenced her work in the Scott home, Mrs. Scott died unexpectedly after a short illness. Mary Egerton returned to her previous residence in Grovesnor Square, leaving Thomas Scott not only in a state of grief but also in extreme desperation, enough so that he made a proposal of marriage to Egerton within a few weeks. It seems unlikely Egerton harbored the kind of heightened sentimentality and exaggerated notions of romantic love that her friend and former student would express in The Noble Enthusiast, for she accepted Scott’s proposal, having known him only a short time and that in the position of pastor and employer, not as a lover. They were married on 4 November 1790, less than two months after the death of the first Mrs Scott, committing what many at that time thought was a serious breach of social decorum.[44] The next year brought about the similarly unexpected death of Mrs. Andrews, just as Maria was nearing the completion of The Noble Enthusiast, an event that may have left a mark upon the novel, for several young female characters have mothers who are deceased. When the novel was finished, Maria asked her sister and father to handle the final publication details with William Lane and the Minerva Press; she then departed for Salisbury for an extended stay with the Hardings, her grandparents. In the months that followed, Anne wrote the Preface to the novel, reviewed the proof sheets, corrected as much errata as she could, and sent her sister copies when the novel finally appeared in print in late June 1792.[45] Evidence from the letters suggests that Anne, possibly assisted by her father, continued her mother’s school at Isleworth for the next two years, all prior to attaining her twentieth year, and that both sisters continued to correspond with Mary Egerton Scott, the latter becoming a significant spiritual influence in their lives after their mother’s death.

Though politics and novel writing appear often in the early correspondence of the two sisters, their growing attraction to evangelical Christianity (introduced to them by Thomas and Mary Scott) and Baptist nonconformity (initiated by their friendships with the Safferys of Salisbury and the Shovellers of London) would soon supersede all other concerns. Maria and Anne may have met the Safferys prior to Maria’s arrival in Salisbury in late December 1791, but it is clear from their correspondence that by the spring of 1792, the two sisters had become friends and correspondents of the Salisbury couple. John (1763-1825) and Elizabeth (1762-1798) Saffery left Portsmouth for Salisbury in early 1790.[46] John Saffery had just been called as the new minister to the Baptist congregation in Brown Street, replacing the recently deceased Henry Philips, the close friend of Jane Attwater. How Maria first met Elizabeth and John Saffery is unclear. It is possible the Andrews sisters first met the Safferys in 1791 through John and Susanna Shoveller (Elizabeth Saffery’s sister), who arrived that year from Portsmouth and took up residence in Upper Newman Street, not far from Grovesnor Square. The Shovellers also met Thomas and Mary Scott that same year, thus creating the possibility that during a visit by the Safferys to London in late 1791, Maria and Anne Andrews met them in the home of the Shovellers in the presence of the Scotts. Maria’s continuing friendship with Mary Egerton Scott may have played a role in Maria’s attraction to the evangelical Calvinism preached by both Thomas Scott and John Saffery. The Safferys and Scotts, like the Steeles, Attwaters, and Whitakers, espoused an evangelical Calvinism (promoted among the Baptists by Andrew Fuller and John Ryland, Jr.) that one writer for the Analytical Review in 1791 described as a ‘midway’ point ‘between Arminianism and Antinomianism’, seeking ‘to establish the true point of orthodoxy’, much like Fuller believed he was doing for Calvinism in his influential work, The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation (1785).[47] Though not a Baptist, Mary Egerton Scott was nevertheless staunchly Calvinistic in her view of the doctrine of Christ, divine grace, and the sovereignty of God, the same doctrines embraced by the Safferys and the congregation at Brown Street. Within a few months of her arrival in Salisbury, Maria Andrews had become a regular attendant at Brown Street. The friendship she and her sister Anne experienced with Elizabeth Saffery, however, would only last for six years, but it reflects in its intensity the numerous other female friendships depicted in the poetry and letters found in the manuscripts in the Reeves and Steele Collections, such as Mary Steele’s friendships with Mary Scott, Jane Attwater, and Elizabeth Coltman, and, of course, that of Maria and Anne Andrews with Mary Egerton Scott.[48]

After the publication of her novel in 1792, Maria Andrews turned once again to poetry, writing numerous poems during the decade, though almost exclusively of a religious nature. Sometime in the first decade of the nineteenth century, she copied thirty-three poems, written between 1794 and 1803, into a thin volume that would eventually find its way into the possession of Jane Attwater Blatch.[49] In late December 1797, Philip Whitaker, Jane Attwater’s nephew, enquired with the Safferys about the possibility of courting Anne Andrews. She had rejected a suitor earlier that year,[50] but in this case, despite having had very little prior contact, she was more amenable. Most likely they first met at church at Brown Street, where Whitaker would have attended on various occasions, especially at meetings of the Western Association of Particular Baptist Churches, to which on several occasions he was a delegate from the Bratton church. In order to begin a formal courtship, he had to seek approval from one of the Safferys, now acting in loco parentis for Anne and Maria. Philip initially wrote to Elizabeth Saffery, but her health preventing her from responding, the duty fell on John Saffery. He wrote to Whitaker on 2 January 1797, informing him that Anne

was surprised at the proposal as that of which she had not the most distant suspicion – After much conversation on the subject, I find she in general said, Your circumstances, & religious Character was such as claimed her respect, & did not furnish the least ground of objection; but she never could think of marrying a man, because he was a good man, or his Circumstances good, & far preferable to her own: that she must be satisfied his attachments to her are such as to promise that she should in all respects make him happy; & of course possess feelings not Dissimilar, as necessary to her own happyness ... while she gave us no room to afford you the least positive encouragement in any thing we may say to you on the subject, she did not object to further acquaintance with you.

For whatever reason, Saffery replied that a meeting between Whitaker and Anne at her grandparents’ home would not be feasible at that time (possibly a reference to the poor health of her grandparents, for her grandfather died this same year). He suggested they meet in his parlour, though he was cognizant that Anne might feel some ‘delicacy’ in the matter, for ‘it will look like coming to you; but we will do what we can to obviate this’. Saffery tried not to take sides in the matter, but he made it clear that the two sisters were now considered a part of his family. ‘To say we are indifferent as to the Issue of this business we cannot’, he writes.

Our esteem for her & her Sister is very great; perhaps it almost borders on Parental affection; & we are deeply interested in their happyness – We have reason to respect you; & can say, Yourself & Family stand high in our esteem also – We shall be sorry if this matter should ever in any way contribute to your distress, or hers – If our good wishes, & poor prayers are of any use to you, you both enjoy them, & however it may terminate, we say, may the Lord direct & bless you.[51]

Whitaker received the letter on the 5^th and responded the next day, proposing to come to Sarum on Monday the 15^th. He had the approval of his family and was convinced ‘a good Wife will be to me an unmeritted Blessing’. He was also confident about his prospects, joking that ‘If the Clerk once gets into the Parson’s Study I hope much Fire will not be wanting’ and wishing Saffery ‘a happy new Y^r and a stolen Sheep in it’.[52]

Anne and Maria returned to London that April, staying with the Scotts in Chapel Street. Anne and Philip were now engaged and making final arrangements for their wedding on 19 June. Maria wrote to John Saffery on 18 April, informing him that her father had attempted to sabotage the arrangements, but through the assistance of Thomas Scott, things were proceeding as planned. Maria made no mention of Elizabeth Saffery, about to enter the final month of her life. It appears that Maria and Anne remained in London until Anne’s marriage, after which Maria settled with Anne in the latter’s new home at Bratton. John Saffery, a widow for one month and ‘exceedingly depressed’, wrote to Anne Whitaker from Portsmouth the week after her wedding. ‘You’ll easily conceive how it is with me’, he writes.

The Shop, Parlors, Chambers, Meeting Streets, Houses, & faces of F^ds, all recall to painful reflection a 1000^d things w^h remind me of w^t I have lost, & pierce me to the [heart] Sometimes I am weary of my groaning, & sleep &c seems to have forsaken me But I w^d not, I think I can say, I do not murmer. It is the Lord, it is right.

Saffery cannot hide his despair, nor can he withhold his desire to see Anne and Maria, which he will do so in a few days:

I long for Tuesday to fly f^m those abodes where I have enjoy’d so much endearing Society, & where as to both Houses all is as death. If I had you or dear Maria with me it w^d cheer the gloom, the former is never to be expected nor desire more than as a visit, &c with these I hope to be often blessed.[53]

His ‘desire’ to see Maria or Anne will quickly move beyond loneliness, turning into something not unlike the situation his friend Thomas Scott found himself in after the death of his wife in 1790. Scott immediately pursued Mary Egerton, but Scott had four children desperately in need of her care. Saffery, on the other hand, had no children, but he had clearly grown accustomed to the company of the two Andrews sisters. Though he still signed his letter ‘Papa’, his emotions would soon exchange a parental concern for a romantic interest, one that would eliminate any further use of that appellation. Saffery waited only three months before making his intentions known to Maria, but now the tables were turned, and he would have to seek approval to court her from Philip Whitaker, who only nine months earlier had sought the same courtesy from Saffery. Approval was granted, of course, but Maria remained silent about the matter. Philip Whitaker advised Saffery to ‘let Patience have her due Sway’ and ‘to keep the Matter as private as possible for a very considerable Time’. He promised to let Saffery know ‘if any Rival starts up’. He had repeatedly asked Maria to write to Saffery, but her chief objection, he confessed, ‘is the unreasonable Hurry you are in to begin an Affair of this Kind’. Whitaker hoped that he would be able to ‘return at a proper Time a kind Office you have perform’d for me’, but he feared Saffery’s haste would create a breach of decorum that will ‘grieve many of Y^r Friends for the Affair to be blaz’d abroad immediately’, a breach not unlike that committed by Thomas Scott in 1790.[54]

The next month Maria was in Portsmouth visiting the Horseys and seeking some medicinal (and psychological) benefit from the sea air, referring to Joseph Horsey and his wife as her grandparents, much as she had John and Elizabeth Saffery as her ‘papa’ and ‘mama’. Soon, however, circumstances would transform these terms of endearment among friends into terms of actual familial relationships, though there is no indication yet as to whether Maria had consented to Saffery’s proposal. The Horseys, as they had prior to their daughter’s death, held Maria Andrews in great esteem and were most likely supportive of their son-in-law’s decision to take their young friend as his second wife. In mid-November Saffery visited the Horseys (both Mr. and Mrs. Horsey have been ill), heightening Maria’s emotional state considerably. ‘I can say y^t his continuance has been matter of thankfulness’, she writes to Anne on 20 November, ‘but I shall tell you more of my various feelings when we meet’.[55] Maria returned to Bratton Farm in early December, in better health and spirits, remaining at Bratton until her marriage on 20 August 1799 to Saffery, the absence of letters in the collection suggesting that their courtship was largely carried on in person on visits to Bratton by Saffery. If they did correspond, the letters were not kept (they may have been too intimate), though given how particular the two sisters were in retaining their letters, such an outcome seems unlikely. The Safferys left the day after their marriage for Salisbury, a ‘memorable day’ as Maria recalled on 21 August 1820.[56]

The only letter from Maria to her sister that autumn is full of politics, indicative of her activities throughout the 1790s. Writing on 19 November, she comments that ‘public calamities’ have of late produced some ‘severe’, even ‘extreme’, sensations for her. ‘[W]hile I profess an utter aversion to y^e common declamatory strain usually indulged over national adversity’, she declares,

I trust my heart is alive to those impressions which human Misery in all y^e diversified distresses of y^e present melancholy Era is calculated to make – I have indeed much greater reason to be jealous of y^e nature than y^e degree of Sensibility w^h I experience from a review of these abounding Evils since I am persuaded much of y^e anguish of my Spirit arises from y^e proud rebellion of my heart.[57]

Her disappointment with Buonaparte’s decision to become ‘Dictator of France’ seems especially bitter to someone who had placed such high hopes on the French Revolution, as did most of her Baptist friends in the West Country. Apparently she had been sending some poems, what she calls her ‘fugitives’, to her sister for review. She also relates in the same letter that she has just spent a few days with the Attwaters at Bodenham; this was the widow and children of Jane Attwater’s brother, Gay Thomas Attwater, who died in 1792. This visit officially links Maria Grace Saffery with all three of the Attwater sisters – Caroline Whitaker (now Anne Whitaker’s mother-in-law) and Jane Attwater Blatch (aunt to Anne’s husband, Philip), both of Bratton, and Marianna Attwater Head of Bradford – and through them to the two remaining members of the original circle surrounding Anne Steele – Mary Steele at Broughton and Elizabeth Coltman at Leicester. The latter two, like Saffery, were maintaining active literary lives in 1799. After 1800, the lives of Maria Grace Saffery and her sister Anne Whitaker would revolve primarily around their large families in Salisbury and Bratton, their churches, their schools, their continued close friendship as expressed through their correspondence, and, in the case of Maria Saffery, the continuation of the religious poetry she had commenced in the mid-1790s, with the addition of numerous poems written to her children, other family members, and various friends, extending a poetic tradition begun by Anne and Mary Steele in the middle of the previous century.

Maria Saffery received a small inheritance from her grandfather,[58] but upon her removal to Salisbury as the wife of a Baptist minister, she soon discovered that life on a Baptist minister’s salary was not the road to affluence. Besides his preaching duties in Salisbury, Saffery travelled throughout the West Country and other parts of England, preaching in Particular Baptist (and, on occasion, Independent) congregations, often on behalf of the Baptist Missionary Society. In the mid-1790s he conducted itinerant preaching tours of Cornwall, and his interest in preaching to small groups of unorganized Baptists in various villages continued until his death. One such group existed at Shrewton, Wiltshire, and his regular preaching there most likely produced a small additional source of income; he also had already commenced his ‘secular’ job (not an uncommon occurrence among Baptist ministers at this time) as a wool and cotton factor, which he would continue for about twenty years, though that too appears to have been fairly unprofitable. After two years of marriage, Maria decided to draw upon her previous experience in her mother’s school at Isleworth and opened her own female academy in their new house in Castle Street in January 1801, an enterprise she would operate from that residence until 1835, establishing a reputation within a few years as a leading school for the daughters of nonconformist families not only from the West Country but from London and numerous provinces in England. Without question, the income from her school eventually enabled the Safferys to live a more genteel lifestyle than would ever have been possible on the salary of a typical provincial Baptist minister. Anne also commenced a day school (apparently for both boys and girls) in Bratton at about the same time, one letter suggesting that she may have employed Thomas Williams, father of Sophia Williams, as a teacher, but there is no indication her school continued beyond 1810. Each sister at various times exchanged children with one another for long periods of time, sometimes for the purpose of education, as in the example of Alfred, Anne’s eldest son, who spent at least one, possibly two years, at his aunt’s school in Salisbury, and at other times for purposes that may have had more to do with solving behavioral issues common during early adolescence.[59] This practice of exchanging children was used by the two sisters even into the teen years for some of their children, a practice that continued among nonconformist families into the nineteenth century.[60]

John Saffery is never mentioned as being a teacher in his wife’s school, most likely because his preaching schedule and extraneous work as a commodities factor sent him on the road almost every week. He was dearly loved as the minister at Brown Street and widely known as a leader among the Particular Baptists, not only within the Western Association but also throughout England, Ireland, Wales, and Scotland through his efforts on behalf of the Baptist Missionary Society the Society for Itinerant Preaching. He was a friend and correspondent of numerous Baptist ministers and missionaries, as exemplified in his extensive correspondence now residing in the Reeves Collection, Angus Library, Regent’s Park College, Oxford.[61] Some of his letters are published in NWW, vol. 6 (others remain in manuscript in the collections at the Angus and Bodleian libraries).[62] F. A. Cox, Baptist minister at Hackney and first historian of the Baptist Missionary Society, praised Saffery for manifesting ‘the deepest interest’ in the Baptist Missionary Society ‘from its commencement’ in 1792; he never ceased, Cox adds, ‘to render his valuable aid in advocating its claims’. To Cox and the other Baptist ministers who worked closely with Saffery, ‘he was a plain but powerful advocate of the mission in the pulpit, but still more so in those private appeals by which he induced many to afford their assistance who were before ignorant or averse from its claims’. Not only was he an effective speaker and fundraiser but, as a member of the BMS Committee, ‘his counsels were highly estimated, being the dictate of a judicious mind and a deeply interested heart’.[63]

Family life became the dominant theme of the letters that passed between the two sisters and their husbands after 1800, with sixteen children between them providing plenty to write about. Anne Whitaker had nine children between 1799 and 1814: Alfred (1799-1852), Joshua (1801-64), Edward (1802-77), Philip (1803-45), Emma (1805-11), Anne (b. 1807), John (1810-64), George (1811-82), and Edwin Eugene (1814-80), all of whom appear in the correspondence as well as some of their spouses and children. Alfred, after working in London and Bristol for most of 1816-21, settled in Frome, where he met and married Sarah Waylen in 1823; unfortunately, like Hannah Towgood Wakeford, she died within a year of her marriage. Maria Saffery composed one poem for Sarah’s wedding and another after her death.[64] Alfred’s second marriage was to Catherine (‘Kate’) Mary Woolbert in 1828, and they had four children, including Alfred Romilly (1831-35) and Edith Rose (b. 1835), to whom Maria Saffery dedicated poems in their infancy and childhood.[65] Joshua would, like his father, become a gentleman farmer in Bratton, as would his son, John Saffery Whitaker (1840-1915), one of five children produced by his marriage to his cousin, Jane Saffery, in 1835. Their first child, Anna Jane (1838-1925), was the subject of three poems by Maria Saffery.[66] Philip Whitaker the younger would die in early middle age in 1845, not long after his cousin, William Carey Saffery, in 1843, and his wife, Selina Eliza Pitt Saffery, in 1844, a period of considerable grief for both families. Anne Whitaker the younger was clearly a favorite not only of her mother but also of her aunt Maria, who visited her often at Holcombe after her marriage to Robert Ashman Green in September 1829. Her second daughter, Rosalie Anne Green (1834-1905) received two poems in her honor by Maria Saffery (see NWW, vol. 5, poems 181, 197). George Whitaker attended boarding school at Frome and then entered Cambridge University, returned to his mother’s original church and taking orders to become an Anglican priest. He served as vicar at Oakington, Cambridgeshire (1840-51), before moving to Toronto, Canada, where he gained considerable recognition as the first Provost of Trinity College (now a part of the University of Toronto). He did not dissolve all ties to his nonconformist upbringing, however, marrying Charlotte Burton, daughter of Richard Burton, Baptist missionary to Sumatra, in 1844. Anne Whitaker’s last child, Edwin Eugene, married Mary Attwater (d. 1865) in 1841. She was the daughter of Philemon (1787-1832) and Eliza Penney Attwater (1789-1877) of Nunton, and granddaughter of Gay Thomas Attwater (1736-92), brother of Jane Attwater. Maria Saffery wrote a poem commemorating her wedding (NWW, vol. 5, poem 208), another instance of the continuing connections between the families that comprised the original Steele circle (the Attwaters) and that of the later Saffery circle (the Whitakers) and of the role poetry played in celebrating those connections.[67]

Maria and John Saffery were married for twenty-five years, and between 1800 and 1812 produced seven children: Philip John (1800-69) (better known as ‘P.J.’), Marianne (1802-76), William Carey (1803-45), Jane (1805-84), Samuel (1807-58), John (1808-89), and Edwin Cecil (1812-14), the latter dying three years after Anne’s daughter, Emma, the only two instances of early death out of sixteen children between the two sisters. P. J. Saffery would attend Bristol Baptist Academy and become a Baptist minister, replacing his father at Brown Street in 1826. He later served as a field representative for the Baptist Missionary Society and the Religious Tract Society. P. J. Saffery’s second wife, Ann Dendy, was also connected with the Baptist Missionary Society. Marianne never married, apparently working for a time either as a governess or in a dissenting school in Weymouth, Dorset, living out her later years in the home of her sister, Jane, in Bratton, in whose home her mother had also lived the final twenty-three years of her life. Samuel spent most of 1821-23 serving an apprenticeship in London, living in the home of a Mrs. Stennett, most likely a relation of Samuel Stennett (1727-95), celebrated Baptist minister and hymn writer at Little Wild Street, London, and friend of William Steele and his daughter, Mary, of Broughton. Samuel copied more than fifty letters sent to him by his parents and siblings during that time into a bound volume that now resides in the Reeves Collection, Box 17, Bodleian Library. He later spent some time on the island of St. Helena, whether for his health or business is not completely known.[68] He married Charlotte Reeve in 1855, but died three years later. John married Jane Hall and became a clerk in the Court of Bankruptcy, London.[69] Apparently he absorbed some of his mother’s love of poetry, for included in the Reeves Collection is his printed poem of thirteen quatrains titled ‘Lines written on reading the speech of his Majesty, the King of Prussia in answer to an address from the Deputies of the National Assembly, and the Deputies of the City of Berlin, on his Birthday, Oct. 15, 1848’, accompanied by a letter of appreciation her received from Christian-Karl Bunsen (1791-1860), the Prussian ambassador, dated 2 November 1848.[70]

On his way home from a preaching engagement in Dorsetshire late in 1824, where he had been collecting money, as he had done for so many years for the BMS, John Saffery suffered severe injuries when he was thrown from the gig in which he was riding. His condition worsened to the point that he could not perform his Sunday duties, and during the second week of January, Maria took her husband to Bath for medical attention, taking lodgings at No. 3 St James’s Parade, returning to Salisbury the next week to prepare for a new school term and tend to her remaining children still at home. Anne Whitaker came to Bath to attend to her brother-in-law, and a month later took him with her to Bratton Farm where she continued to attend to him. ‘He certainly collects his internal resources more in your absence’, Anne writes to Maria, ‘still I cannot but wish you with him on your own account’.[71] ‘I certainly do not think the result of his present severe illness is to be calculated by us’, she adds. ‘We all know what must be the consequence if the tone of his stomach does not improve.’ Anne’s fears for John Saffery’s recovery were well founded, and he died three weeks later, on 9 March. Saffery returned to Salisbury before his death, however, providing an opportunity for a proper farewell to all the family. Maria composed the lines for his gravestone, her grief still evident in her poem addressed to her daughter Jane on her 20^th birthday on 1 May (NWW, vol. 5, poems 75-6).

For the time being, Maria and Jane continued to operate their school out of their large home in Castle Street. P. J. Saffery replaced his father as pastor of the congregation at Brown Street in 1826, an event that brought considerable pleasure to his mother. Apparently, it was not enough to keep her or Jane from considering closing their school and finding new situations for themselves. Maria inquired about the possibility of taking over a school recently established by F. A. Cox in Hackney. She came to London in the spring of 1829 to make further inquiries about the feasibility of converting Cox’s school to a female academy. Hackney had long been a primary location for boarding schools for the children of dissenting parents; Mary Steele had attended Mrs. King’s establishment in Hackney in the 1760s, and Elizabeth Coltman attended not far away in Stoke Newington. Maria’s friend (and most likely her former student), Eliza Gregory, daughter of the Baptist writer and mathematician, Olinthus Gregory (1774-1841), heard that a Mrs. Shepheard intended opening a school in Hackney and wrote to Maria suggesting that, given this new competition, she might want to rethink her plans.[72] More than likely Maria Saffery declined the offer of assuming control of Cox’s property due to the expenses such property entailed, not from any possible rivalry with another schoolmistress. Maria Saffery continued her school at Salisbury until the spring of 1835, when she sold the property and moved with her daughter Jane to Bratton, where the latter was about to create a new home and identity as the wife of Joshua Whitaker.[73] Age was obviously one factor in her retirement (Saffery was 63 in 1835), as was her daughter’s marriage, but another factor was also the substantial income she received in 1834 from the publication of Poems on Sacred Subjects, which was published by subscriptions.[74] That income, coupled with what she made from the sale of the house in Castle Street and whatever other savings she might have accumulated from her school income, enabled Maria Saffery to enjoy a comfortable retirement for the next twenty-three years in the home of her daughter, not as wealthy as Mary Steele at Broughton or Elizabeth Coltman at Leicester, but, like them, worshiping in her local Baptist church and sharing the final years of the life of Jane Attwater Blatch (who died in 1843 at the age of ninety) and her Attwater relations at Bodenham, Nunton, and Bradford. As her correspondence reveals, Saffery remained artistically active, writing poetry into the 1840s (much of it included in her manuscript volume ‘Lyra Domestica’,[75] with some poems appearing in magazines and newspapers) and visiting her children (as well as Anne’s children) in Weymouth, Holcombe, Bath, Hastings, Cambridge, and London, into the late 1840s.

Anne Whitaker survived her husband by eighteen years, living to the age of ninety-one, having been born the year before hostilities began between England and the American colonies and dying at the close of the American Civil War. Anne lived in relative ease in her home at Bratton, a regular attendant at the Bratton Baptist Church, supporter of the work of the Baptist Mission, and advocate for the abolition of slavery, to which its final success in 1833 owed much to the work of the Baptist missionaries in Jamaica, led by William Knibb, formerly of the Broadmead church in Bristol. In her later years Anne was assisted by her son, Joshua, and eventually by his son, John Saffery Whitaker, both prominent gentleman farmers in Bratton. She also paid frequent visits to her daughter Anne and son Alfred in nearby Holcombe and Frome, and, after 1835, enjoyed the company of her dutiful daughter-in-law, Jane Saffery Whitaker, her sister, Maria Grace, as well as her husband’s aunt, Jane Attwater Blatch, and her younger sister-in-law, Sophia Williams Whitaker, whose home at Yew Trees would eventually become the depository of the majority of the manuscripts that make up the Reeves, Attwater, and Saffery/Whitaker collections. The latter’s death in 1891 (at the age of 101) officially ended a continuous stream of nonconformist women writers in Hampshire and Wiltshire that began in 1689.

A Tangled Web: Uncovering the Reeves Collection at the Bodleian Library

In 1999 I was first introduced to the Steele Collection by Jennifer Thorp, at that time the archivist at the Angus Library, Regent’s Park College. I was searching a reference to Joseph Cottle in one of the letters in that collection. I discovered it was not a letter by Joseph Cottle (1770-1850) of Bristol, friend and publisher of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey, but rather his grandfather. After skimming through some letters from Jane Attwater to Mary Steele, composed during the 1770s and ’80s, I made a note to myself that these letters ‘would be an excellent project’. Little did I know that my failure that day to find what I was looking for would indeed lead to ‘an excellent project’, the eventual publication of the writings of a remarkable group of nonconformist women that now comprise the eight volumes in NWW.

Jennifer Thorpe mentioned to me that I might want to meet Marjorie Reeves, a resident of Oxford and former professor at St Anne’s College who had just published, at the age of 92, Pursuing the Muses: Female Education and Nonconformist Culture 1700-1900 (1997). This book provided an overview of a considerable amount of material in the Steele Collection at the Angus Library. Reeves’s book also brought to light a considerable amount of previously unknown material in her own possession, which she had been depositing at various times in the Angus Library throughout the 1990s (now known as the Reeves Collection, Saffery Papers, and the Attwater/Whitaker Papers), some of which had appeared previously in her first book on her West Country family history, Sheep Bell & Ploughshare (Bradford-on-Avon, UK: Moonraker Press, 1978). Other projects took my interest and time for the next seven years, and not until 2007 did I turn my attention once again to the Steele Collection. Unfortunately, Reeves died in 2003, and I was never able to meet and discuss my ideas with her, something I deeply regret. I proceeded nevertheless to make a much more thorough exploration of the Steele Collection and the materials left to the Angus by Reeves, much of which had not been catalogued. I realized there was far more to this material than Reeves had explored in Pursuing the Muses.

After viewing what I thought was all the material used by Reeves in her book and assuming that, after her death, any material she owned concerning the Steele, Attwater, and Saffery families not previously deposited was now safely in the library’s possession, I presented a proposal early in 2008 to Pickering & Chatto to publish a series of volumes based on these materials. I was on an extended research trip at Oxford at that time, making sure that all the materials I wished to include in the volumes were indeed at the Angus Library. However, I discovered that two important manuscript collections of poetry were missing: a chapbook of poems by Marianna Attwater from the late 1760s and a larger bound volume of poems by Maria Grace Saffery from the late 1830s and early 1840s, titled ‘Lyra Domestica’, as well as a rare copy of Anne Steele’s Verses for Children (1788). After searching through all the material left by Reeves in the Angus Library, even asking Thorpe (at that time the archivist at New College, Oxford) to assist me in my search of the library’s archives, I came to the conclusion the missing materials were not there. I contacted the executor of Marjorie Reeves’s estate, Anthony Sheppard, as well as Madeline Barber of Oxford, seeking guidance as to where these missing materials might be. I was informed that Reeves had not left everything to the Angus Library, as I had assumed, but instead deposited materials at St Anne’s College and the Bodleian. I immediately went to the library at St Anne’s and examined a large collection of manuscript and printed sources left by Reeves, but found nothing pertaining to the West Country women writers I was seeking. I contacted two archivists at the Bodleian, but received no response. After several weeks, I went to the Special Collections at the Bodleian to see if I could find someone who knew about Marjorie Reeves and the collection of materials she had left with the library. I met Colin Harris, Superintendent of the Reading Rooms, Special Collections, at the Bodleian and he informed me that the archivists I had previously contacted had retired, which explained the lack of a response to my query, but he did indeed know about the Reeves deposit and was fairly sure he could find it for me. Harris took me into a large room inside the New Bodleian building filled with stacks of un-catalogued material, only a fraction, he informed me, of the un-catalogued holdings of the Bodleian. About halfway along the right-hand wall we came to a group of boxes marked ‘Reeves’. As I looked at the top box, I saw immediately in Marjorie Reeves’s hand an envelope marked ‘Saffery poems, Lyra Domestica’, and I knew we had come to the right place. The boxes were in poor condition and the materials disorganized. Reeves had placed the materials into hundreds of envelopes, adding identifying notes above the address labels. Manuscript letters, including many she used in Pursuing the Muses, had been folded and placed into envelopes, with hundreds of letters from the early and mid-nineteenth century having never been opened. Reeves left the Bodleian six boxes of material (now divided into 29 boxes), and I proceeded to make a preliminary examination of each box, locating all the manuscript letters pertaining to the women writers I wanted to use in my volumes and all their manuscript poems. I eventually found Marianna Attwater’s book of poems, and in the last box and last envelope I opened, the only extant complete copy of Anne Steele’s Verses for Children. At this point I had finally completed the checklist I had begun in the Angus Library, discovering along the way a significant body of material I did not know existed, material Reeves did not mention and did not use in her book but which I knew was important to telling the entire story of this remarkable coterie of West Country women writers.

I was now confronted by two large collections of material in two libraries, the overwhelming majority of which was un-catalogued and un-calendared. I proceeded that spring and on successive trips for the next three years to calendar as much as possible all the materials in both libraries. Thanks to the librarians and staff at both the Angus and the Bodleian libraries, I was given boxes, envelopes, and plastic sleeves that enabled me to organize, separate, flatten, identify and date hundreds of manuscript letters and poems, preserving in many cases some very fragile material. Overall, the letters that Marjorie Reeves deposited to the Angus Library were in better condition than those she left with the Bodleian. Why Reeves split the collection between the two libraries is not known, but her decision created considerable difficulties in organizing and identifying the correspondence between Maria Grace Andrews Saffery and her sister Anne Andrews Whitaker, as well as correspondence by other individuals, all of which appear in Volumes 6 and 8 of NWW. The letters were not divided according to a logical pattern, and a perusal of the locations of the letters as they are presented in those volumes makes that very clear, as the citations jump repeatedly from one library to the next. The letters deposited at the Angus were better organized and preserved than those at the Bodleian due to some careful, preliminary work performed by Thorpe. All of the material left by Marjorie Reeves at both libraries pertaining to the individuals appearing in these volumes has now been calendared, and considerable genealogical research (much of it indebted to the work of Reeves, John Broome, and Serena McLaren, a descendant of Maria Saffery) has been completed on the Steele, Attwater, Whitaker, and Saffery families. A massive amount of material relating to the Victorian generation of these families, however, remains un-calendared in both libraries, including hundreds of letters still in their original envelopes and retaining their original Queen Victoria stamps, a collection deserving further exploration.

Notes

[1] For the complete poetry, prose writings, and correspondence of the women of the Steele/Saffery circle, both published and unpublished, along with biographical and critical introductions, see Timothy Whelan, gen. ed., Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840, 8 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011) (hereafter NWW); for extended analyses of Mary Steele, Mary Scott, Jane Attwater, and Elizabeth Coltman, see Whelan, Other British Voices: Women, Poetry, and Religion, 1766-1840 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

[2] Marjorie Reeves, Sheep Bell & Ploughshare (Bradford-on-Avon, UK: Moonraker Press, 1978), p. 92.

[3] Moira Ferguson visited Steele-Smith at his home in Yorkshire in preparation for her two articles on Mary Scott, though it does not appear she saw all of his material, for she was still unable to identify all the individual writers in the Steele circle. See Moira Ferguson, ‘‘The Cause of My Sex’: Mary Scott and the Female Literary Tradition’, Huntington Library Quarterly 50 (1987), pp. 359-77; also Ferguson’s chapter, ‘Mary Scott: Historicizing Women, (En)Gendering Cultural History’, in her monograph, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: Nation, Class, and Gender (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 27-43.

[4] See John Broome, Hymns by Anne Steele (London: Gospel Standard Trust, 1967), and more recently, A Bruised Reed: The Life and Times of Anne Steele (Harpenden, Hertfordshire: Gospel Standard Trust Publications, 2007), the only complete biographical study of Anne Steele.

[5] See Marjorie Reeves, Sheep Bell & Ploughshare (Bradford-on-Avon: Moonraker Press, 1978); idem, The Diaries of Jeffrey Whitaker, Schoolmaster of Bratton, 1739-41 (Trowbridge: Wiltshire Record Society, 1989); idem, Pursuing the Muses: Female Education and Nonconformist Culture 1700-1900 (London: Leicester UP, 1997); idem, ‘Literary Women in Eighteenth-Century Nonconformist Circles’, in Culture and the Nonconformist Tradition, ed. Alan Kreider and Jane Shaw (Cardiff: U of Wales Press, 1999), pp. 7-24; idem, ‘Jane Attwater’s Diaries’, in Pilgrim Pathways: Essays in Baptist History in Honour of B. R. White, ed. William Brackney, Paul Fiddes, and J.H.Y. Briggs (Macon: Mercer UP, 1999), pp. 207-22.

[6] Selections from the diary of Anne Cator Steele, as well as her surviving letters, poems and short prose pieces, can be found in Whelan, NWW, vol. 8, pp. 15-74.

[7] For selections from the spiritual diary and meditations of Mrs. Walrond, see Whelan, NWW, vol. 8, pp. 1-14; for the poetry, prose meditation, and some published letters of Hannah Towgood Wakeford, see NWW, vol. 4, pp. 107-16; also vol. 8, pp. 75-104.

[8] See Louis Benson, The English Hymn: Its Development and Use in Worship (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1915), p. 214; J. R. Watson, The English Hymn: A Critical and Historical Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 191; Richard Arnold, ‘A ‘Veil of Interposing Night’: The Hymns of Anne Steele (1717-78)’, Christian Scholar’s Review 18 (1989), p. 373.

[9] For the complete poetry, prose, and correspondence of Anne Steele found in the 1760 and 1780 editions, as well as Anne Steele’s impressive body of unpublished poetry and prose, see NWW, Volumes 1 and 2, edited by Julia B. Griffin.

[10] For the complete poetry of Mary Steele Wakeford, see NWW, vol. 4, pp. 117-50; for her correspondence with Anne Steele, see NWW, vol. 2, pp. 273-4, 282-3, 289-311, 314-5, 329-31.

[11] For the complete poetry, prose, and correspondence of Mary Steele, see NWW, Volume 3.

[12] Aside from entries in various encyclopedias of women writers compiled since the late 1980s, Mary Scott is the subject of two essays by Moira Ferguson: ‘‘The Cause of My Sex’: Mary Scott and the Female Literary Tradition’, Huntington Library Quarterly 50 (1987), pp. 359-77; and ‘Mary Scott: Historicizing Women, (En)Gendering Cultural History’, in Ferguson, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets, pp. 27-43; see also Timothy Whelan, ‘When kindred Souls unite’: The Literary Friendship of Mary Steele and Mary Scott, 1766-1793,’ Journal of Women’s Studies 43 (2014), pp. 619-40; and idem, ‘Mary Scott, Sarah Froud, and the Steele Literary Circle: A Revealing Annotation to The Female Advocate,’ Huntington Library Quarterly 77 (2014), pp. 435-52.

[13] For the poetry and correspondence of Mary Scott, see NWW, vol. 4, pp. 1-106, 259-309.

[14] Reid and her brother, Dr. John Reid (1773-1822), were friends of some prominent London Unitarians, including the Barbaulds, Aikins, and Crabb Robinson. For more on Reid, see Reid 53-55; some correspondence concerning Reid can be found in the Coltman Papers 15D57/63, 15D57/226; a lengthy description of her can also be found in Coltman, ‘Journal’ 15D67/449; for her place within the Steele Circle and a London circle involving her friends the novelist Mary Hays and the poet/writer Elizabeth Benger, see Whelan, Other British Voices, pp. 161-70; for Mary Steele’s poem to Reid, see NWW, vol. 3, p. 162.

[15] For Coltman’s poetry and prose writings, see NWW, vol. 4, pp. 215-34, 239-57; vol. 7, pp. 14-22, 275-326.

[16] For the story of Jeffrey Whitaker, see Marjorie Reeves, The Diaries of Jeffrey Whitaker Schoolmaster of Bratton (Trowbridge: Wiltshire Record Society, 1989).

[17] Philip’s son, Joshua, would be a very successful farmer in Bratton. His son, John Saffery Whitaker, would continue the Whitaker farming tradition until his death in 1915. See Reeves, Sheep Bell, pp. 62-5.

[18] For the poetry of Marianna Attwater, see NWW, vol. 4, pp. 151-90.

[19] For the poetry of Jane Attwater, see NWW, vol. 4, pp. 191-213; for selections from her correspondence, prose writings, and diary, see NWW, vol. 8, pp. 105-306. A portion of Caroline Attwater Whitaker’s diary from 1820 can also be found in NWW, vol. 8, pp. 483-92.

[20] For the diary of Sophia Williams, 1812-17, see NWW, vol. 8, pp. 437-81. For more on the Whitaker family in Bratton, including considerable material on the children of Caroline Whitaker, Anne Whitaker, and Jane Saffery Whitaker, especially concerning their education and the books they owned, see Reeves, Sheep Bell; idem, Pursing the Muses. For more on Thomas and Sophia Whitaker, see Reeves, Sheep Bell, pp. 36-41, 92.

[21] For the diary of Elizabeth Horsey Saffery, see NWW, vol. 8, pp. 399-436.

[22] See J. E. Ryland, The Life and Correspondence of John Foster (London: Jackson and Walford, 1848); Pastoral Memorials.

[23] Most of what we know of Frances Ryland comes from her diary. Nothing is said of her in James Culross’s The Three Rylands (1897), and, much like the fate of Mary Egerton Scott at the hands of her stepson, J. E. Ryland makes only a brief mention of his mother in his ‘Memoir’ of his father in Pastoral Memorials (1828). He notes her place of origin and identifies her father, then adds that ‘after having for nearly six and thirty years been permitted to share his joys and sorrows’, the death of John Ryland in 1825 forced her ‘to make a surrender of her chief earthly felicity’, but not without expressing her ‘fervent gratitude to heaven for so long and inestimable an union’. At present, nothing is known of Frances Ryland’s life after her husband’s death or when she died. J. E. Ryland’s ‘Memoir’ closes with a poem in tribute of his father composed by his father’s friend, Joseph Cottle (1770-1853), and relation of Anne and Mary Steele. See J. E. Ryland, Pastoral Memorials, vol. 2, p. 42, 60-1; for the diary of Frances Barrett Ryland, see NWW, vol. 8, pp. 307-97.

[24] The ODNB incorrectly gives the date as ‘March or early April 1791’.

[25] See NWW, volume 6, letters 24, 215.

[26] For an introduction to Mary Egerton Scott, as well as the complete texts of The Path to Happiness, The History of Mrs. Wilkins, Plain Truth for Plain People, see NWW, vol. 7, pp. 7-14, 207-74.

[27] One daughter of the Housemans survived and married John Rylands, Esq., of Warrington. For more on the Housemans, see Robert Fletcher Houseman, The Life and Remains of the Revd Robert Houseman, A.B. (New York: Robert Carter, 1846), pp. 35-9; obituary for John Audley, Congregational Magazine, 10, New Series (August 1827), pp. 401-09; Audley Papers, 132/B.73, 74, 76, Cambridgeshire Record Office, Cambridge; Thomas Stamford Raffles, ed., Memoirs of the Life and Ministry of the Rev. Thomas Raffles, D.D., LL.D. (London: Jackson, Walford, and Hodder, 1864), pp. 133-34.

[28] Houseman, Life and Remains, p. 68.

[29] Houseman, Life and Remains, p. 68.

[30] For the complete text of Susan Ward, see NWW, vol. 7, pp. 327-37.

[31] Richard Ryland, Esq. (1747-1832), was a cornfactor in business with Joseph Stonard at 5 Great Tower Hill. His father, John Ryland, was a friend of Samuel Johnson and frequently met with the literary sage and their friends at Dilly’s bookshop in the Poultry. His wife, Harriet (b. 1760), was the daughter of Sir Archer Croft, Bart. The Rylands had thirteen children and at the time of the above letter were living in a spacious mansion at Champion Hill, near Ramsgate, Peckham, in south London. Three sons – John Croft (b. 21 December 1788), Richard Henry (christened 29 June 1790), and Archer (christened 5 April 1792) – appear in later letters, as well as two daughters, who will figure prominently in these letters – Harriet-Frances (b. 21 March 1786) (the subject of the above letter) and Lucy (christened 29 July 1787). Mrs Ryland would continue to bear children until 1807, just two years before she became a grandmother. Archer Ryland married Jane Muggeridge in 1820; he would become a prominent London attorney and legal historian. His younger brother, Octavius (1800-86), married Archer’s sister-in-law, Mary Ann Muggeridge (an ancestor of the famous writer, Malcolm Muggeridge), but by 1850 had become a destitute widower. He was arrested that year for extortion against his former minister, W. B. Collyer, and deported to a penal colony in Australia. He would later be pardoned and become a teacher in Australia. For many years the Rylands were members of John Clayton’s Independent congregation at the Weigh House in London. They moved their membership to Collyer’s congregation at Peckham after a public dispute with Clayton (Benjamin Flower’s brother-in-law) in 1804-5 concerning how the Rylands were raising their children. The dispute led to a vicious pamphlet war between the Rylands and Clayton which involved several other London ministers and writers, continuing into 1809 and leading to some serious discussions of Nonconformity and certain aspects of contemporary culture, especially the theatre and dancing. One response was written by Harriet Ryland; in closing her pamphlet, she included two letters written to her daughter, who had had been reprimanded at school for demonstrating a haughty attitude. In a letter brimming with dissenting piety, Harriet Ryland admonished her daughter to examine herself in light of spiritual values – values that, according to Rev. Clayton, Mrs. Ryland did not possess. The daughter of those letters is either Harriet Frances or Lucy. See Harriet Ryland, An Address to the Rev. John Clayton, in Answer to those Parts of the ‘Counter-Statement,’ which relate to Mrs. Ryland. To which is subjoined the whole of the suppressed correspondence to Mr. Clayton, from Mrs. Ryland (London: T. Conder, 1805); for a complete history of this controversy, see Appendix 4, ‘The Richard Ryland/John Clayton Pamphlet War, 1804-1805’, in Timothy Whelan, Politics, Religion, and Romance: The Letters of Benjamin Flower and Eliza Gould Flower, 1794-1808 (Aberwystwyth: National Library of Wales, 2008), pp. 352-6.

[32] Volume 6 of Nonconformist Women Writers contains the majority of the letters composed by the two sisters and addressed to their children. However, space did not allow the inclusion of hundreds of letters to Maria and Anne by their children, a collection of letters that can be found in the Saffery/Whitaker Papers, Angus Library, and the Reeves Collection, Bodleian. Ann Taylor and her family moved to Ongar, Essex, in February 1812, from Colchester, where Ann’s father, Isaac Taylor (1759-1829), served as minister to the Independent congregation and also operated a successful engraving business, one that employed Ann (1782-1866), her sister Jane (1783-1824), and brother Isaac (1787-1865). In 1798 Ann began to perform contract work for the London publisher, Darton & Harvey, contributing regularly to the Minor’s Pocket Book (using the noms de plume ‘Clara’ and ‘Maria’), eventually becoming the editor. She and Jane were also employed in doing small prints for juvenile works. Isaac Taylor began supplying monthly portraits to the Theological Magazine in 1800, requiring assistance from both his daughters. All three children would become successful writers in their own right, with the two sisters composing many hymns and some of the most important writings for children in the early decades of the nineteenth century (Jane was the author of ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’). By the date of the above letter, Isaac, who been working in London for about two years, was experiencing poor health. As a remedy, he spent much of the summer of 1811 in Devonshire taking miniatures of friends known to the Taylors who had moved there, and, according to Doris Armitage, became ‘acquainted with many families there’, one of which may have been the Whitakers. He returned to Devonshire, along with his two sisters, in the fall of 1811, spending the entire winter of 1811-12 at Ilfracombe, Devon. They returned to help their family move to Ongar, then returned once again to Ilfracombe for long stays during the next two years. However, the Whitakers of Bratton do not appear in Isaac Taylor’s Memoirs and Poetical Remains of the late Jane Taylor (London, 1825) or Josiah Gilbert’s edition of the Autobiography and other Memorials of Mrs. Gilbert (London: Henry S. King, 1874). It seems likely, however, that they did become acquainted with the Whitakers during their first visit to Devon, and as a result, may have recommended a young Joseph Stapleton of Ardleigh Hall, a member of Isaac Taylor’s church at Colchester, to live and work with the Whitakers in preparation for his becoming a gentleman farmer in his own right. During his time at Bratton, he met and fell in love with Lucy Ryland. His marriage proposal, however, has not escaped some criticism from his friend Ann Taylor, as the above letter reveals. For more on the Taylors, see Doris Mary Armitage, The Taylors of Ongar (Cambridge: W. Heffer, 1939), pp. 47, 56, 204-05; Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

[33] Marjorie Reeves was the first to uncover the letters of the Andrews sisters when she gained access to the materials from the home in Bratton that had served as the final repository for most of the materials that now comprise the Attwater Papers and the Saffery/Whitaker Papers, Angus Library, and the Reeves Collection, Bodleian Library. She briefly discussed some of the early letters that passed between the two sisters from the 1790s, as well as some extended exploration of the education of the children of both sisters, in Sheep Bell & Plough Share (1978) and Pursuing the Muses (1997).

[34] Julian, A Dictionary of Hymnology (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1892), pp. 986-7.

[35] See Reeves Collection, Box 14/6, Bodleian; also NWW, vol. 6, letters 66, 122, 208, 211, and 222.

[36] See NWW, vol. 4, poem 75.

[37] A Sarah Andrews was christened at Greenham on 11 May 1778, and may be the younger sister of Maria and Anne. However, throughout the poetry and correspondence, no mention is made of another sister; if this was their sister, it seems most likely she died in infancy.

[38] See Nonconformist Women Writers, vol. 6, letter 66.

[39] See Nonconformist Women Writers, vol. 6, letter 51.

[40] Cf. Mary Steele, who composed her poem, Danebury (see NWW, vol. 3, pp. 33-41) at the age of fifteen in 1768, though she did not publish it until 1779; it was dedicated to her father, not to a political figure.

[41] For the text of Cheyt Sing, see NWW, vol. 5, pp. 55-70.

[42] For Mary Egerton Scott’s correspondence with the Andrewses, see NWW, vol. 6, letters 1-9, 31, 35, 48, 61; for the complete texts of three of her prose tracts, along with a biographical introduction, see vol. 7, pp. 207-74.

[43] Ian Maxted, The London Book Trades 1775-1800 (Folkstone, Kent: Dawson, 1977), p. 73.

[44] For the complete story of Mary Egerton’s marriage to Thomas Scott and her career as a writer, see Introduction, Nonconformist Women Writers, vol. 7, pp. 7-14.

[45] For a complete history of the composition and publication of the novel from evidence in the correspondence, see Introduction, NWW, vol. 7, pp. 1-7; for an analysis of the novel, see the Douglass Thomson’s Introduction, also in NWW, vol. 7, pp. 35-43.

[46] For more on the life of Elizabeth Saffery, as well as the complete text of her diary from 1797-8, just prior to her death on 22 May 1798, see NWW, vol. 8, pp. 399-436.

[47] Quotation from a review of Antinomianism Unmasked and Refuted (1791), by the Baptist poet and polemicist Maria de Fleury (1752/53-92), in the Analytical Review 9 (March 1791), p. 340.

[48] Friendships between sisters is an even more powerful theme among the poems and letters of some of the women in the Steele circle: ie., Anne Steele and Mary Steele Wakeford; Mary Steele and her half-sisters, Anne and Martha; Jane Attwater and her sisters, Caroline and Marianna; and, of course, Maria and Anne Andrews. Nearly all these women used pastoral noms de plume as their literary names, but their friendships were not mere literary constructs; consequently, we can assume with considerable confidence that the letters and poems addressed by Hannah Towgood (‘Amynta’) to ‘Aurelia’ (see Nonconformist Women Writers, vol. 4, p. 114, and vol. 8, pp. 81-6) were meant for a real friend.

[49] See Attwater Papers, acc. 76, II.A.2, Angus Library, Oxford.

[50] A Mr A–, who appears in NWW, vol. 6, letter 93.

[51] NWW, vol. 6, letter 94.

[52] NWW, vol. 6, letter 95.

[53]Nonconformist Women Writers, vol. 6, letter 97.

[54]Nonconformist Women Writers, vol. 6, letter 99.

[55]Nonconformist Women Writers, vol. 6, letter 103.

[56]Nonconformist Women Writers, vol. 6, letter 310.

[57] NWW, vol. 6, letter 110.

[58] See the letter from the solicitor, James Sykes, to Saffery, dated 16 September 1799 (Nonconformist Women Writers, vol. 6, letter 108). Maria’s grandfather died in 1798. Her father continues to appear in the correspondence after 1800; he left Isleworth in 1805 and resettled in the West Country, purchasing a small rural estate in Wiltshire, not far from Salisbury. He may have sold the mill in Isleworth (or lost it, which is the more likely scenario, since later references to his finances are not positive). As the correspondence reveals, he visited Bratton and Salisbury often, even traveling with Anne and her young son, George, to his original home at Shaw, near Newbury, in September 1817 (see NWW, vol. 6, letters 289-91). He never appears, however, to have been fully reconciled to his two daughters and their Baptist faith. It also does not appear that he remarried, and his death date is not known, though he was still alive in 1825 (see NWW, vol. 6, letter 329).

[59] For Anne Whitaker’s letters to Alfred, written when he was between the ages of five and seven, see Reeves Collection, Box 15/3, Bodleian; also Nonconformist Women Writers, vol. 6, letters 125, 133, 136, 142, and 146. Alfred’s presence at Salisbury suggests that Saffery may have taught both boys and girls in the same room as day students, as may also have been the case with Anne’s school in Bratton.

[60] Sons who were serving apprenticeships routinely lived in the family of the master, and among dissenters, it would have been rare that a son would serve an apprenticeship for a master who was not a dissenter. Teenage daughters were sent to live in the families of other dissenters as well. Ann Copland, daughter of John Dawson Copland, Esq., of Saxthorpe Hall, near Aylsham, Norfolk, was the sister of a former apprentice to Benjamin Flower. After Flower’s marriage to Eliza Gould in 1800, Ann spent two years living in the Flower home, assisting Eliza with various domestic duties, though clearly not living as a servant. Her situation is similar to that of Harriet and Lucy Ryland, who will live in the Saffery home between 1806 and 1812 (see Nonconformist Women Writers, vol. 6, for the Ryland letters). The Safferys were reimbursed for room and board expenses of the two Ryland girls, another source of income, it appears, for the Safferys. The Flower Correspondence does not reveal whether the Flowers received compensation for Ann Copland or whether her various duties were considered sufficient for her room and board. See Whelan, Politics, Religion, and Romance, pp. 56, 253.

[61] For John Saffery’s letters, see Reeves Collection, R1-20, Angus Library, Oxford; Saffery/Whitaker Papers, acc. 142 and 180, Angus Library; and Reeves Collection, Box 14/4, 14/7, 15/1, 19/3/(b.), and 22/2, Bodleian Library.

[62] See NWW, vol. 6, letters 56, 67, 73, 94-5, 97-100, 105, 107, 110-11, 117, 120, 122, 194, 196, 204, 206, 209, 212, 214, 252-3, 258, 261, 276, 313, 316, 326-7.

[63] F. A. Cox, History of the Baptist Missionary Society 1792-1842, 2 vols (London: T. Ward, and G. and J. Dyer, 1842), vol. 1, pp. 287-8.

[64] See NWW, vol. 5, poems 69, 72.

[65] See NWW, vol. 5, poems 84-5, 172, 209.

[66] See NWW, poems 177, 204, 205. Marjorie Reeves examines the records of Bratton Farm and the farming habits of the three generations of Whitaker farmers – Philip, Joshua, and John – in Sheep Bell, pp. 62-65.

[67] A large collection of the letters of Anne Whitaker’s children, both among themselves and to her and her husband, Philip, can be found in the Reeves Collection, Boxes 1, 9, 10-11, Bodleian. In NWW, vol. 5, poem 246, are lines written by the three youngest sons of Anne Whitaker – John, George, and Edwin – commemorating their father’s 54^th birthday in 1820.

[68] See his letter to Miss Ann Phillips, while on board the Malcolm off St. Helena, 12 May 1834, with her response on the back page of the letter, in Saffery/Attwater Papers, acc. 142, II.D.6, Angus Library.

[69] One of his sons, Joseph John, established an accounting firm in London in 1855 that would eventually become one of the England’s leading accountancy firms, known today as Saffery Champness. He was a member of the first council of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) and its president from 1889 to 1891. See ‘What’s in a Name – Firms’ Simplified Family Trees’, Accountancy (1989), p. 122.

[70] See Reeves Collection, Box 17/8, Bodleian; copies of the poem and the letter by Bunsen were sent to Jane Saffery Whitaker by Jane Hall Saffery, accompanied by a letter, dated 5 December 1848, explaining the circumstances of the poem and the letter.

[71] NWW, vol. 6, letter 333.

[72] NWW, vol. 6, letter 341.

[73] Jane Whitaker would continue her mother’s work in children’s education at Bratton, a discussion of which can be found in Reeves, Pursuing the Muses, pp. 156-89.

[74] See the collection of twenty-seven letters from various friends and literary figures involved in obtaining subscriptions to Poems in Saffery/Whitaker Papers, acc. 142, II.D.3, Angus Library.

[75]Reeves Collection, Box 25/1, Bodleian; also published in NWW, vol. 5.