Sarah Mullett Hall

Sarah Mullett Hall (1780-1852) lived at home until her marriage to an American businessman, Charles Henry Hall (1782-1852), in 1815, shortly after the failure of her father’s firm. Like J. J. Evans and their cousin Sarah Biggs, Sarah Mullett and her sister Jane were also connected to the literary scene of London during the first decade of the nineteenth century, developing acquaintances with most of the same individuals known to Sarah Biggs, including Mary Steele’s friend, Mary Reid, and Eliza Fenwick (1766-1840), a novelist and friend of Mary Hays, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Crabb Robinson. Crabb Robinson confirms this in his Diary on 23 March 1832: ‘His letter about Mrs Hall received—not yet in correspondence together—The first letter I sent referd to as lost—My second letter and his to me referred to—Why I cannot set off immediately to America—too old to move rapidly . . . I know not the great men of America . . . I am not envious of the growing prosperity and great population of America—These quals when English not admired by me—He must come and fetch me—I have kept myself disengaged expecting him—I might accompany him in the Autumn of 1833—Want his account of himself—No other letter considered as anything—The history of Mr Mullett’s family—Message to Mrs Hall about the Evans and Tobins—to enquire about Mrs Fenwick Message to her about Miss Hays & Godwin” (Crabb Robinson Diary, vol. 14, f. 190). After a few years in Cadiz, the Halls settled in America, living for a time in Connecticut (Mr. Hall’s birthplace) before settling in the Harlem section of New York City, where they remained until their deaths in 1852. Frederick Mullett (1781-1834), Sarah’s brother, also immigrated to America to be near his sister, and with the help of Mr. Hall, was placed into a business that he maintained until his death in 1834. The Halls, who became ardent, evangelical Congregationalists in America, had three children: two daughters, Eliza (1822-1894) and Mary Jane (c. 1823-93), and a son, Charles. Mary Jane never married, but in 1849 Eliza, at that time in her late twenties, married Lewis Albert Sayre (1820-1900), a physician who for most of the last half of the nineteenth century was the leading orthopaedic surgeon in the world. Besides his long tenure on the faculty of surgery at Bellevue Hospital in New York City (c. 1860-1900), Sayre also served as resident physician for the city of New York and assisted in the founding of the New York Pathological Society, the New York Academy of Medicine, and the American Medical Association, for which he served as president in 1880. He toured England and Europe in 1871-72 and again in 1877, lecturing widely while performing hundreds of surgeries that significantly expanded the practice of orthopaedic surgery. In their later years, the Sayres, along with Mary Jane Hall, lived at 285 5th Avenue, in Manhattan, New York. For more on Sarah and the Mullett family history, including the patriarch Thomas Mullett, see Jane Mullett Evans, Family Chronicle of the Descendants of Thomas Evans, of Brecon, from 1678 to 1857 (Bristol: privately printed, c. 1870); also Timothy Whelan, “From Thomas Mullett to Charles Dickens, Jr.: Creating, Sustaining and Expanding a West Country-London Baptist Circle.” Baptist Quarterly 48.2 (2017): 78-100.