Hemmings, Gurney, Dunkin, Hays, and Flower Family Connections, 1780-1820

The discussion below, detailing the fascinating connections that existed between a group of Baptist families from Southwark and the City of London in the latter decades of the 18th and early years of the 19th century, is taken from Timothy Whelan, “Mary Hays and Dissenting Culture, 1770-1810.” The Wordsworth Circle 50 (Summer 2019): 318-47.

Several Baptist families lived in Keene’s Row, along Walworth Road, in the 1790s and the early years of the 19th century, including the Gurneys and the Hemmingses, both of whom attended the Baptist meeting in Maze Pond, Southwark, and were intimately connected with Benjamin and Eliza Gould Flower. Eliza Gould spent her youth in Bampton, Devon, before serving as a governess in Tiverton and a schoolmistress in South Molton; she became engaged to the writer and antiquarian, John Feltham (1770-1803), c. 1796. Feltham’s patron, Joseph Haskins of Honiton, was a good friend of Thomas Poole of Nether Stowey and, after Gould broke off the engagement in 1798, Haskins became her benefactor as well.39 Desiring to support herself independently, Gould became a governess once again, this time to a wealthy family near Bedford; her living conditions in the top floor garret, however, proved detrimental to her health and she removed to London in the summer of 1799 to live with the Gurney family in Keene’s Row, a family already known to Gould.  Joseph Gurney (1744-1815), a deacon at Maze Pond, had been a bookseller before becoming a prominent shorthand writer for the Old Bailey and House of Commons. His wife, Rebecca (1747-1814), and daughter, Eliza (1770-1840), were especially close to Gould. The origin of her friendship with the Gurneys is not known, but since Gould was raised a Baptist and continued to worship in Baptist and Independent congregations thereafter, she could have made connections with Southwark Baptists like the Gurneys quite easily, the same way the Andrews sisters interacted with several Gainsford Street Baptists in 1796. By the early 1790s, Gould, like Mary Hays, had departed from her Particular Baptist upbringing in Bampton and moved into Arianism, even attending lectures in London by Joseph Priestley c. 1793-94, which may have been when she first met the Gurneys and possibly Mary Hays, who probably attended those same lectures.1

In August 1799, Gould accompanied Rebecca Gurney to Newgate Prison to meet Benjamin Flower, who was serving a six-month sentence for libeling the Bishop of Llandaff in his newspaper, the Cambridge Intelligencer.2 Flower would have known of the Gurneys since his youth, for they all had grown up in the City of London in close proximity to each other. Flower may even have been a business acquaintance of the Gurneys, for his first book, The French Constitution (1792), mentions works printed by Martha Gurney (1733-1816), Joseph’s older sister and a prominent Dissenting bookseller/printer in Holborn and whose advertisements would later appear in Flower’s newspaper. A correspondence between Flower and Gould began immediately and continued almost daily throughout the autumn of 1799, culminating in their marriage on January 1, 1800, at the Parish Church of St. Mary, Newington, in Southwark. [For more on the Gurneys and William Fox, see Timothy Whelan,  “Martha Gurney and William Fox: Baptist Printer and Radical Reformer, 1791-94,” in Pulpit and People: Studies in 18th Century Baptist Life and Thought, ed. John Briggs (Milton Keynes: Paternoster Press, 2009). 165-201; Whelan, “William Fox, Martha Gurney, and Radical Discourse of the 1790s,”  Eighteenth-Century Studies 42 (2009): 397-411; and Whelan,  “Martha Gurney and the Anti-Slave Trade Movement, 1788-94,” in Women, Dissent and Anti-Slavery in Britain and America, 1790-1865, ed. Elizabeth J. Clapp and Julie Roy Jeffrey (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011), 44-65.]

Living adjacent to the Gurneys was John Hemmings (1760?-1825?), son of a linen draper in High Street, Borough, and his wife, Martha Smithers Hemmings (1763-1833), daughter of Henry Smithers, a coal dealer who, like Joseph Gurney and Henry Keene, was a deacon at Maze Pond. The younger Hemmings worked with his father for a time and then for several years as a scotch factor in Bearbinder Lane, Mansion House, before becoming a broker on the Stock Exchange. The Hemmings were known to the Dunkins by the late 1790s, for just after John Dunkin, Jr., moved his family to a stately home in Champion Hill, the Hemmings moved into the Dunkins’s previous residence at No. 2 Paragon Place (St. Gile’s Parish Rate Books for 1798, Archives, John Harvard Library, Southwark). By 1801, however, the Hemmingses were back in Keene’s Row, their return coinciding with the departure that year from Keene’s Row of Henry Smithers, Hemmings’s father-in-law, whose deceased wife, Martha, was the sister of Henry Keene (St. Mary Newington Parish Rate Books for 1801, 1st Division, fols. 64, 66, Archives, John Harvard Library, Southwark). In 1807, on a journey to Wales on behalf of his coal business, Smithers visited Mary Steele’s half-sister, Anne Steele Tomkins (1769-1859), and her husband, Joseph Tomkins (1763-1847), both formerly of the Baptist congregation in Abingdon led by Daniel Turner (1710-98).3 Turner was a friend of Robert Robinson, an early patron of George Dyer,4 and an old friend of the Steele family, having composed hymns and poems with Anne Steele at Broughton in the 1740s and, like his friend Caleb Evans, corresponded with Mary Steele after her aunt’s death in 1778.5

During his visit, Smithers left Anne Tomkins a copy of his recently published Affection, and Other Poems, clearly aware of her familial connection to two of the most important Baptist women poets of the eighteenth century. Anne Tomkins and Henry Smithers would also have talked about the various Tomkinses who attended at Maze Pond, relations of her husband and, like Smithers, leaders in the church since the 1740s.6 It was in the home of Benjamin Tomkins (most likely Joseph Tomkins’s cousin and at that time a neighbor of John Dunkin, Jr., at Champion Hill) that Mary Steele Tomkins (1793-1861), eldest daughter of Anne and Joseph Tomkins and Mary Steele’s favorite niece, visited often during her time as a boarding student at Mrs. Sarah Norton Biggs’s school in nearby Peckham between 1803 and 1806.7 Anne Tomkins had known Biggs (1768-1834) from their childhood in the West Country (they were born one year apart) as a result of the friendships between the Steeles and the family of Caleb Evans and his two brothers-in-law, Robert Norton, Sarah’s father, and Thomas Mullett (1744-1815), both having been members of Evans’s Baptist congregation in Broadmead in Bristol and who by the 1790s had become Unitarians.  Mullett settled in London in the late 1780s and in 1799 met William Godwin, Mary Hays, and Crabb Robinson. Upon her arrival in London in 1802, Sarah Norton Biggs began moving in a circle of London Dissenters that eventually included Crabb Robinson and several other former West Country Baptists turned Unitarians known to Robinson and Mary Hays, including Anthony Robinson (1762-1827), a writer for the Analytical Review and the Monthly Magazine, and two of Biggs’s cousins – Jane Mullett Tobin (1782-1837), wife of James Webbe Tobin (1767-1814) (his brother was the Bristol dramatist John Tobin [1770-1804]), and Joseph Jeffries Evans (1768-1812), Caleb Evans’s son. [See Timothy Whelan, “Mary Steele, Mary Hays and the Convergence of Women’s Literary Circles in the 1790s,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 38.4 (2015), 516-19; and Whelan, Whelan, Timothy, “From Thomas Mullett to Charles Dickens, Jr.: Creating, Sustaining and Expanding a West Country-London Baptist Circle,” Baptist Quarterly 48.2 (2017),  96-97.]

As with Henry Smithers, John Hemmings’s father likewise offers some revealing connections to Hays and these ever-expanding Dissenting circles in Southwark in the 1780s and ’90s. In 1788, John Hemmings, Sr., was listed as one of the directors of the London Humane Society along with Joseph Gurney and Dr. William Hawes (1736-1808), founder of the Society. In 1790, William Hawes’s daughter, Sophia (1761-1828), married Russell Scott, three years after his settlement as Unitarian minister in Portsmouth. In 1796, Hawes’s son, Benjamin (1770-1860), married Ann Feltham, sister of John Feltham, Eliza Flower’s former fiancé. Two other daughters, Harriet and Maria Hawes (1768-1849), joined Eliza Gurney as close friends and frequent companions of Eliza Gould both before and after her marriage to Benjamin Flower in 1800, and they appear often in her correspondence. In December 1797, Maria Hawes married John Gurney (1768-1845), eldest son of Joseph Gurney and who, like John Dunkin, Jr., Benjamin Flower, and William Button, also attended J. C. Ryland’s academy in Northampton. John Gurney became a barrister in 1793 and quickly gained notoriety for his defense of Thomas Hardy and John Horne Tooke during the famous Treason Trials of 1794-95. At that time, Gurney met Godwin and many of his radical Dissenting friends.8 Mary Hays certainly knew of Gurney’s work and political leanings at that time, and Crabb Robinson who would later become Gurney’s friend and colleague during Robinson’s career as a solicitor (1813-29). In 1832 John Gurney was knighted and appointed Baron of the Exchequer, yet throughout his rise to prominence he remained on close terms with Benjamin Flower and Crabb Robinson (Gurney himself appears to have joined them as Unitarians at some point), both of whom became relations of Gurney through the marriage of his daughter, Harriet (d. 1874), to John Edward Fordham (1799-1881) of Royston.9

   After Eliza Gould’s marriage to Benjamin Flower, she stayed with the Hemmingses on several visits to London. If she stayed with them when they lived at the Paragon, Gould would have learned of the Dunkins, the house’s former inhabitants, though she may have been aware already of John Dunkin’s connection to her husband via their early education in Northampton as well as Dunkin’s relationship to Mary Hays, a name Eliza Flower probably knew through her own interest in Jacobin novels of the 1790s and Hays’s frequent presence in one of Dissenting culture’s most popular periodicals at that time, the Monthly Magazine.  In December 1802, two of John Hemmings’s daughters assisted Eliza Flower by knitting clothes or stockings on behalf of the Benevolent Society of Cambridge, a society organized in large part by Eliza in 1801. Between late 1802 and early 1804, two of the Hemmings’s sons lived with the Flowers in Cambridge.10 During her visits at that time to her South London friends, Eliza Flower would not have been far from Mary Hays residence at 9 St. George’s Place, Camberwell (she lived there from 1803-06). In May 1806, Eliza Flower enjoyed an extended visit with the Hemmingses, and that October most likely attended an event that may well have led to a meeting between her and Mary Hays, who by that time had moved to 3 Park Street, Islington. On October 8, 1806, at St. Mary, Newington, the same Southwark church where Eliza Gould and Benjamin Flower were married on January 1, 1800, and where Samuel Palmer and Martha Giles were married on October 25, 1803, Martha Hemmings (1788-1866), John Hemmings’s daughter, married Summerhays Dunkin (1779-1823), John Dunkin’s half-brother. The young Dunkins would soon move next door to the Gurneys in Keene’s Row (St. Mary Newington Parish Rate Books for 1807, 1st Division, fol. 80, Archives, John Harvard Library, Southwark). Most likely Eliza Flower attended the wedding or the wedding dinner and would have been joined there by the Gurney and Dunkin families and, not inconceivably, by Mary Hays, who had maintained close ties to all her Dunkin relations since the 1770s. Among those who signed as witnesses to the marriage that day was John Dunkin’s father, John Dunkin, Sr., and his unmarried daughter, Mary Dunkin (c. 1756-1832), now the domestic head of the elder Dunkin’s home since the death of his second wife, Mary Summerhays Dunkin, in February of that year.11 Mary Dunkin was an old friend of Mary Hays (she was three years Hays’s senior), appearing often as “Miss Dunkin” (and sometimes as “Miss Prudence”)  in the 1779-80 Mary Hays-John Eccles correspondence and occasionally serving as the couple’s necessary though undesired chaperone on various excursions from Gainsford Street.51 By the time of his young step-brother’s wedding, John Dunkin, Jr., would have arrived at the event like his father, a widower with several unmarried daughters, three of whom would later that year remove to Islington to receive their finishing education in the home of Mary Hays.

Notes

1.  Priestley lectured to the young people of the Gravel Pit Unitarian congregation in Hackney, which, as Robert Aspland writes in his memoir of Eliza Gould Flower, “to a mind like her’s, were in the highest degree improving, and tended to strengthen her faith in the gospel” (Aspland, “Mrs. Flower,” 204.)

2.   Crabb Robinson also visited Flower in late July or early August 1799 (Robinson Reminiscences, 1799, 1.f.117). 

3.  Anne Steele Tomkins writes to Mary Steele (at this point Mrs. Thomas Dunscombe, for she married in 1797) on 8 January 1808: “We have lately become acquainted with a gentleman from London who is entering on an extensive trade in this country who would probably have been a great acquisition had we continued here. He is a very intelligent man of a Literary turn & has a large family probably Mr D[unscombe] – may have heard of him his name is Smithers – he pass’d one night here & at parting presented us with a book which contain’d poems lately publish’d by himself & some exquisite engravings’ (Whelan, Nonconformist Women Writers, 3.372).

4.  See Daniel Turner to Mr. Munn, June 14, 1782, in Daniel Turner: Letters, MSS, and Poems, 1743-82, FPC/c.55, Angus Library, Regent’s Park College, Oxford.

5.   Turner was aware of Mary Steele’s poetic abilities and her intent to replace her aunt as the leader of the Steele circle of women writers in the West Country. He writes to Steele on 19 November 1778, “God has given you, Madam, a more enlightened Understanding, a brighter Genius, a more exalted & enlarged Soul, than He has done to many others, and rank’d you with the distinguish’d few; He expects, & all that know you expect, from you a more exalted & distinguishing Deportment under the Calamities of Life, more exemplary fortitude, patience, resignation . . .” (Whelan, Nonconformist Women Writers, 3.290-91).

6.  See the 1740s correspondence between Edward Tomkins and Benjamin Wallin, minister at Maze Pond, in the Benjamin Wallin Collection, Gratz Sermon Collection, Box 5, Pennsylvania Historical Society Library, Philadelphia.

7.   According to the St. Giles Poor Rate Books, which included parts of Camberwell, John Dunkin and Benjamin Tomkins lived in close proximity to each other, not far from the esteemed medical doctor Jonathan Coakley Lettsom (1744-1815), the same doctor who attended to John Eccles during his fatal illness in 1780. Situated nearby was Sarah Norton Biggs and her school, as well as Richard Ryland (1747-1832) (no relation to the Rylands of Northampton), another wealthy cornfactor and prominent member of the Independent congregation at the Weigh House, London, who entered into a pamphlet war in 1805-06 with his pastor, the Revd John Clayton (1754-1843), Benjamin Flower’s estranged brother-in-law. Two of Ryland’s daughters would board at Maria Andrews Saffery’s school at Salisbury between 1805 and 1813, all further illustrations of the remarkably diverse yet intricately connected nature of Dissenting culture. See Whelan, Politics, Religion, and Romance, 352-56; Whelan, Nonconformist Women Writers, 6.200-341, and 3.352-68.

8.   Gurney appears in a set of letters between 1794 and 1796 (Scott Collection) that includes such correspondents as Jeremiah Joyce, Russell Scott (Mary Scott’s brother), and four friends or soon-to-be friends of Mary Hays and Crabb Robinson – Thomas Holcroft, William Godwin, John Evans, and J. T. Rutt. These letters concern the Treason Trials of 1794 and efforts by Gurney and others to assist Thomas Fyshe Palmer and Edward Skirving prior to their deportation to Australia.

9.   Fordham was related to the wives of Richard Flower and Thomas Robinson, the brothers of Benjamin Flower and Crabb Robinson. For more on the Fordhams, see Alfred Kingston, A History of Royston, Hertfordshire, with Biographical Notes of Royston Worthies, Portraits, Plans and Illustrations (London: E. Stock, 1906), 225-29. 

10.  For references to the Hemmingses in Eliza Gould Flower’s letters, see Eliza Gould to Benjamin Flower, November 20, December 22, December 24, December 29, 1802; March 22, 1804; and May 8, 1806; Benjamin Flower to Eliza Gould Flower, December 16 and 19, 1802 (Whelan, Politics, Religion, and Romance, 258-59, 264, 268, 270-71, 273-74, and 290).  John Hemming, Jr. (1794-1847), one of the sons who lived for a time with the Flowers, later pastored the Baptist church in Kimbolton, Huntingtonshire, from 1817 to 1847.

11.  London, England, Church of England Marriages and Banns, 1754-1932, St. Mary, Newington, 1806. Summerhays Dunkin’s son, Christopher (1812-81), was born in Keene’s Row and emigrated with his parents to America in 1821, later becoming a prominent figure in Canadian politics.