Sarah Norton Biggs 

Sarah Norton Biggs (1768-1834) was the daughter of Robert Norton and Hannah Evans Norton (the latter was the sister of Caleb Evans, Baptist minister at Bristol). Sarah Norton married Matthew Evans Biggs of Bristol in 1795 (he may have been a distant relation of hers on the Evans' side). Sarah had joined the Broadmead Baptist Church in 1788 and was still listed as a member in 1802. Her husband, Matthew Biggs, worshiped at the Presbyterian (Unitarian) chapel in Lewin’s Mead, not among the Baptists at Broadmead, for their children were baptized and entered into the Lewin's Mead records. Given the movement into Arianism and Unitarianism by the Mulletts and Evanses in London in the 1790s, it may be that Robert Norton and his family made a similar move after their removal to Nailsworth in the early 1790s, although Hannah Norton still appears as a member at Broadmead in the late 1790s, but not her husband. After Matthew Biggs's death in 1801, Sarah Norton Biggs removed to London c. 1802-03 to be closer to her relations among the Mullett, Evans, and Thomas families, establishing a school for young ladies in Peckham (she later moved the school to Denmark Hill) assisted by her cousin, a Miss Thomas, most likely the daughter of Thomas Thomas, who moved to Peckham around 1799, although the cousin could also have been the daughter of her other uncles in London, Timothy Thomas of Devonshire Square or his brother Lemuel, for whom J. J. Evans worked in the early 1790s. In any case, the Particular Baptist Miss Thomas appears to have had no qualms about working for someone professing Unitarian beliefs and who, like the Mulletts and Evanses, most likely attended the General Baptist congregation in Worship Street. Neither did Mary Steele and her half-sister Anne Steele Tomkins, living then at Abingdon and a prominent member in the Baptist congregation there. Anne Tomkins sent her eldest daughter (and Mary Steele’s favorite niece and namesake), Mary Steele Tomkins (1793-1861), to Miss Biggs academy from 1803 to 1806, where she became close friends for life with her classmate Mary Biggs, Sarah Biggs’s daughter. Jane Evans writes that Sarah Biggs "was a woman of decidedly superior intellectual powers, which it was her delight to cultivate. She was also, thouhh not handsome, a striking looking woman, with an elegance of manner and possessing much taste" (Family Chronicle 40). Her aunt’s school in London, she adds, "was an excellent one, far superior to the generality of schools of that day; its superiority being much owing to aunt Biggs’ real appreciation of what education should be, and her own admirable mode of communicating knowledge. She knew how to teach her pupils to wish to learn. To her I feel I, and I know many others feel, they owe much, for she also set before us continually a high standard of duty, an inexpressible advantage to the young" (Family Chronicle 41). In 1808 J. J. Evans’s two daughters, Jane Mullett Evans (the family historian) and Mary Mullett Evans, joined their older friends at Mrs. Biggs’s academy. Jane would later write in her Family Chronicle that during these years Mary Biggs became like a sister to her (Evans, Family Chronicle, 21). For many years prior to her removal to Bristol c. 1830, Sarah Norton Biggs moved in the same Dissenting and literary circle as the Mulletts and the Evaneses, a circle that included William Godwin, Crabb Robinson, the Tobins, Mary Hays, Elizabeth Benger, and even her old friend from Broughton, Mary Steele.

      Sarah Norton Biggs had three children from her short-lived marriage to Matthew Biggs. The youngest daughter, Sarah, died in 1821. Matthew (b. 29 July 1796) married Maria Sybella Cooper of Bristol in 1825 and shortly thereafter immigrated to Lima, Peru. Their son, Matthew H. Biggs (b. 1827), left Peru in 1852 for the new frontier of California at the height of the Gold Rush, becoming one of the founding fathers of Santa Barbara. Mary (b. 5 March 1798) attended her mother’s school with Mary Steele Tomkins and later assisted her mother when the school was located at Denmark Hill. Not long after her marriage in June 1826 to her cousin, Thomas Mullett Evans (1799-1834), son of J. J. and Mary Anne Evans, the couple removed from London to Bristol, where Mrs. Biggs later joined them in retirement. After the deaths in 1834 of her husband and her mother, Mary Biggs Evans returned to London to work for the fledgling publishing firm of Bradbury and Evans, the latter partner being her cousin and brother-in-law, Frederick Evans. During the last year of her five years as a proofreader with the firm, she corrected the text of Charles Dickens’s early novel, Pickwick Papers, another indication of the literary proficiency and advanced educations received by the women in the Mullett, Evans, and Steele families, a distinctive feature of Dissenting culture exemplified by these West country Baptist families from the 1720s through the 1830s (Evans, Family Chronicle, 42). One character in Dickens’s novel, ‘Mr. Serjeant Buzfuz’, was based on a London solicitor, Charles Carpenter Bompas (1791-1844) of Bristol, who in 1822 married Mary Steele Tomkins, Mary Biggs Evans’s childhood classmate in her mother’s school and Mary Steele’s niece.  Around 1839 the Bompases, staunch Baptists, moved to London, settling at 11 Park Road, Regent’s Park, becoming known to Dickens most likely through Mary Biggs Evans, who left London the following year to join her brother in Peru, where she apparently died, though the actual date and location of her death are not known.  For references to Sarah Norton Biggs in Mary Steele’s correspondence, see Timothy Whelan, gen. ed., Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840, 8 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), 3.356, 361-65, 369; Jane Mullett Evans, Family Chronicle of the Descendants of Thomas Evans, of Brecon, from 1678 to 1857 (Bristol: privately printed, c.1870), 21; James Williams, "Cultural Tension: The Origins of American Santa Barbara," Southern California Quarterly, 60:4 (1978), 349-377.