Provenance of the Steele and Reeves Collections, Angus and Bodleian Libraries, Oxford

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]

For a calendar of the materials in the Reeves Collection, Bodleian, click here; for the Saffery/Whitaker Papers in the Angus Library, click here; for a combined chronological calendar of the Saffery/Whitaker and Attwater Letters in the Reeves Collection, Bodleian Library, click here and here.

Timothy Whelan

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 andNonconformist 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.