Richard Ryland 

Richard Ryland (1747-1832) was a cornfactor in business with Joseph Stonard at 5 Great Tower Hill (Lowndes [1799]: 152). Stonard was a London Dissenter and an original member of the committee that founded the Sunday School Society in 1785.  Ryland’s father, John Ryland, was a friend of Samuel Johnson and frequently met with the literary sage and their friends at Dilly’s bookshop in the Poultry. The younger Ryland was married to Harriet Croft (b. 1760), the daughter of Sir Archer Croft, Bart. The Rylands lived at 14 Savage Gardens, Great Tower Hill, before moving into a mansion at Champion Hill, near Ramsgate, Peckham, a suburb of London. By that time the Rylands had thirteen children. Three sons – John Croft (b. 21 December 1788), Richard Henry  (christened 29 June 1790), and Archer (christened 5 April 1792) – and two daughters – Harriet-Frances (b. 21 March 1786) and Lucy (christened 29 July 1787-c. 1833) would become intimate with Maria Grace Saffery through their connection with her school at Salisbury. Harriet Ryland bore children until 1807, just two years before she became a grandmother. The Rylands were members of John Clayton’s Independent congregation at the Weigh House in London for 17 years. They moved their membership to W.B. Collyer’s congregation at Peckham after a public dispute with Clayton (Benjamin Flower’s brother-in-law) in 1804-5 concerning how the Rylands were raising their children. The dispute led to a vicious pamphlet war between the Rylands and Clayton which involved several other London ministers and writers, continuing into 1809 and leading to some serious discussions of Nonconformity and certain aspects of contemporary culture, especially the theatre and dancing. One response was written by Harriet Ryland; in closing her pamphlet, she included two letters written to her daughter, who had had been reprimanded at school for demonstrating a haughty attitude.  In a letter brimming with dissenting piety, Harriet Ryland admonished her daughter to examine herself in light of spiritual values – values that, according to Rev. Clayton, Mrs. Ryland did not possess. The daughter of those letters is either Harriet Frances or Lucy. See Harriet Ryland, An Address to the Rev. John Clayton, in Answer to those Parts of the “Counter-Statement,” which relate to Mrs. Ryland.  To which is subjoined the whole of the suppressed correspondence to Mr. Clayton, from Mrs. Ryland (London: T. Conder, 1805); for a complete history of this controversy, see Appendix 4, ‘The Richard Ryland/John Clayton Pamphlet War, 1804-1805’, in Timothy Whelan, ed., Politics, Religion, and Romance: The Letters of Benjamin Flower and Eliza Gould Flower, 1794-1808 (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, 2008), 352-6.