Mary Steele Tomkins 

Mary Steele Tomkins (1793-1861) was the eldest daughter of Anne Steele Tomkins of Broughton and later Abingdon. She maintained much of the Steele Collection before passing the manuscripts and printed materials on to her daughter, Selina Bompas (1830-1921). Mary Tomkins was the eldest child of Joseph and Anne Steele Tomkins, Mary Steele’s half-sister. After their marriage, the Tomkinses lived at Caldecott and Oakley, two large estate homes, in Abingdon. Joseph Tomkins was a banker, but he indulged in other investments and speculations in the early 1800s, one of which forced the family to move to Malpas, Wales, in 1805. They left there in early 1808 for Bath, where they lived for several years. They would later live in two houses near Southampton and after Mary Steele’s death in 1813, assumed ownership of Broughton House (after much refurbishment) as well as most of the Steele properties around Broughton. Mary Steele Tomkins was baptized and joined the Broughton Baptist Church in 1819. In April and May 1806, just prior to her visit to Bath, she was visiting in the home of Dr. Joseph Mason Cox (1763-1818), who operated an insane asylum in the Fishponds and lived nearby at Overn House. The asylum was established at Stapleton in 1738 by Joseph Mason (1711-79), who moved it to the Fishponds in 1760. Dr. Cox’s cousin was Selina Carpenter Bompas (1767-1809); she married Charles Bompas and they had three sons, the eldest being Charles Carpenter, Mary Steele Tomkins’s future husband. How the Tomkinses and the Coxes became close friends is not known; they may have been relations on Mr. Tomkins’s side, but it may be that they had met through their church affiliation. Both families were Baptists, the Tomkinses being one of the leading families in the congregation at Abingdon and Dr. Cox an attendant at the Baptist meeting in Broadmead, first under the leadership of his friend, Caleb Evans (also a close family friend of the Steeles in Broughton and the Tomkinses in Abingdon, where his son would eventually settle) and later under Dr. John Ryland, Jr. Mary Steele Tomkins’s parents came to get her at Overn House in early June 1806, visited Bath with her for about a week or so, then brought her back to Overn and returned alone to their home in Wales. Mary would remain in the West Country for remainder of the summer. One further note worth mentioning: In 1809, about the time of his wife’s death, Charles Bompas, Sr., deserted his family and emigrated to North America, where he died in 1820. Dr. Cox took the Bompas children under his care in his home at Overn. The Bompases, however, had been connected with Overn for many years prior to Mr. Bompas’s desertion of his family, for in Selina Bompas’s MS history of the Steele family (STE 12), she says that her mother, Mary Tomkins, first met her future husband on a visit to Overn in 1802. Charles Bompas, Jr., was smitten with her from the beginning, but they did not marry until 1822, when Mary Tomkins was 29.  He would later become a prominent solicitor on the Western Circuit, eventually settling in London at 11 Park Road, Regent’s Park, and was generally considered to be the original of Charles Dicken’s ‘Mr. Serjeant Buzfuz’ in Pickwick Papers. For her correspondence with her aunt, Mary Steele (1753-1813) of Brougton, and one surviving poem by her, see Timothy Whelan, ed., Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840, 8 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), vols. 3 and 4.